Gartner report: 70% of organizations will implement structured automation by 2025

A recent Gartner survey of 304 infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders and their teams found that 85% of I&O leaders that do not currently have any full automation expect to become more automated in the next two to three years.

Given rising interest in I&O automation, Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% of organizations will implement structured automation to deliver flexibility and efficiency. This is an increase from 20% of organizations who had implemented structured automation in 2021.

The survey found I&O is most often using automation within deployment domains, a natural focus point of automation activities as organizations work to reduce friction found at the intersection of I&O and its technology-producing consumers. Most respondents report their efforts in automating application deployment, security compliance and server deployment to be impactful and valuable. 

However, the rise of devops, Agile and site reliability engineering (SRE) has led to more automation within operational domains, like monitoring and analytics and incident problem resolution. The survey found that with just 43% of I&O teams currently automating monitoring and analytics, 83% find such automation efforts to be valuable. Similarly, only 36% of I&O teams are automating incident and problem resolution, but it’s considered valuable by more than three-quarters of those respondents. 

The survey also found that only 21% of I&O leaders report high levels of success in their automation endeavors. To successfully manage I&O automation and increase success, Gartner experts recommend that I&O teams automate deployment, but ensure they do not neglect automating valuable operational opportunities such as change management, vulnerability remediation, and backup and disaster recovery.

Lay foundations for success by determining automation’s potential value, improving processes before automating and equipping the workforce with critical automation skills.

Methodology

Gartner’s 2022 Adaptive Automation in Infrastructure & Operations Survey was conducted April through May 2022 among 304 respondents from North America, EMEA and APAC, across industries and companies with $1 billion or more annual revenue. Qualified respondents were senior IT I&O leaders, their peers or direct reports with IT automation initiatives within their scope of responsibilities.

Read the full report [subscription required] from Gartner.