The Spacelift 2025 Infrastructure Automation Report highlights a disconnect between organizations' perceived automation maturity and actual capabilities, with nearly half claiming high automation maturity but only 14% exhibiting true excellence. Successful organizations that innovate fast prioritize automation for scalability, efficiency, and resilience, leveraging tools like Terraform or Ansible to automate provisioning, configuration, and monitoring tasks. However, many organizations fall into the trap of perceived maturity due to inefficiencies, security gaps, and missed opportunities, often compounded by a lack of clear metrics for assessing automation success. Adoption of tools without a cohesive strategy, neglecting Day-2 operations, and inadequate security and governance are common pitfalls contributing to this illusion. To overcome it, organizations must address systemic gaps through strategic interventions grounded in objective assessment and cultural transformation, adopting orchestration and platform engineering practices, and leveraging tools like Spacelift to simplify and accelerate infrastructure provisioning.