IT Acronyms: A Cheat Sheet for IT Pros

Working in the IT industry today can feel like drowning in alphabet soup. You can't become an IT pro until you've mastered a litany of acronyms, abbreviations, and flashy buzzwords that commonly feature in discussions of modern technology.

Some of those industry acronyms — like IT or AI (short for information technology and artificial intelligence) — are straightforward enough. Others — such as DaaS (which could be short for either desktop as a service or database as a service, depending on the context) — stand for terms that may not be so obvious. And in some cases, the jumbles of letters you encounter — such as DX or o11y (which stand for digital transformation and observability) — aren't even exactly acronyms, which makes their meaning even more challenging to piece together for the uninitiated.

That's why we've prepared this IT acronyms cheat sheet — to help IT practitioners sort through the reams of acronyms, portmanteaus, and other tricky terms they have to understand to do their jobs effectively. You won't find every possible IT-related acronym; that would make the guide unreasonably long. But you will find the most important terms for IT pros to know in today's industry based on current trends and dominant technologies.

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