Organizations are adopting infrastructure automation tools unevenly across operating environments. While provisioning and configuration automation are common, orchestrating these activities into a service lags. In the Gartner IT Score for I&O (June 2023), 65% of organizations classified as “mature” are “orchestrated into service delivery” approaches, versus 25% for all other organizations. The opportunity for leaders is to move beyond basic automation to integrate multiple tools and practices into scalable workflows.

Continuous infrastructure automation and platform engineering will drive further adoption, supporting application delivery and operational reliability.

Key Findings & Recommendations:

• Pressure remains high on infrastructure and operations (I&O) to accelerate infrastructure deployments while maintaining operational excellence.
• Orchestration remains underutilized by I&O teams due to perceived complexity, assumed loss of control and steep skills requirements.
• Infrastructure automation vendors are delivering tools with overlapping feature sets, which exacerbates tool sprawl, overspend and skills acquisition challenges.
• I&O leaders, faced with organic platform engineering initiatives, are challenged to offer more self-service delivery capabilities without sacrificing stability, reliability, governance, security and flexibility.
• Increase infrastructure agility by investing in infrastructure automation and orchestration tools that accelerate infrastructure delivery.
• Unlock the value of infrastructure orchestration by evaluating tools that provide low- code interfaces and generative AI (GenAI) capabilities to speed adoption.

Gartner, Market Guide for Infrastructure Automation and Orchestration Tools, Chris Saunderson, Hassan Ennaciri, Daniel Betts, 21 February 2024

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