The Hard Truth About Infrastructure Automation

The report reveals that many organizations overestimate their infrastructure automation maturity, with only 14% actually demonstrating true automation excellence. The Speed-Control Paradox is a significant challenge, where teams prioritize speed over control, leading to security risks and drift. Successful organizations, or "Leaders," have found a way to balance speed and control by implementing developer self-service with guardrails, platform engineering for consistency, security as a built-in foundation, cost optimization as a priority, and orchestration over automation. The report provides an Infrastructure Automation Leadership Index to help teams objectively measure their automation maturity, with four categories: Experimenters, Adopters, Optimizers, and Leaders. A free self-assessment tool is also available to help organizations understand where they stand in the index.