Infrastructure automation is transforming IT operations in organizations of all sizes and industries. As infrastructure and workloads become increasingly complex, automation is essential to efficiently manage resources, reduce costs, and drive innovation.
What is Infrastructure Automation?
Infrastructure automation refers to automating IT processes and workflows related to the management and provisioning of infrastructure resources. This includes both physical infrastructure like servers and hardware, as well as virtualized infrastructure like cloud services or virtual machines.
The goal of infrastructure automation is to streamline repetitive, manual tasks involved in deploying, configuring, orchestrating and managing infrastructure components. By implementing policy-based automation, organizations can achieve greater consistency, speed and accuracy in IT operations.
Infrastructure automation helps organizations by:
- Provisioning infrastructure rapidly to meet changing needs
- Reducing configuration drift and technical debt accrued over time
- Enforcing security, compliance and governance policies
- Promoting collaboration between IT teams
- Optimizing processes through better visibility and insights
Industry Adoption
According to Enterprise Management Associates research, the adoption of infrastructure automation solutions is growing rapidly:
- 78% of organizations currently use some form of infrastructure automation
- An additional 12% plan to implement infrastructure automation within 12 months
The drivers behind this growth include digital transformation initiatives, cloud migrations, technology modernization and cost reduction through improved efficiency.
Market Size
The infrastructure automation software market is projected to grow from $4.7 billion in 2021 to $22.7 billion by 2028 according to Grand View Research, reflecting a CAGR of 25.2%.
Key Capabilities and Benefits
Infrastructure automation delivers compelling benefits across a diverse set of capabilities:
Flexible Provisioning
Infrastructure automation allows organizations to provision resources across environments including on-prem, cloud, hybrid and edge infrastructure. Ready-made templates enable rapid, consistent deployments while ensuring governance.
According to research by Forrester, infrastructure automation can reduce server provisioning times by over 80%.
Configuration Management
Tools can automatically track configurations and changes made to critical infrastructure over time. This improves visibility, enables rollback to earlier versions if issues emerge and reduces configuration drift.
Integrations
Leading solutions provide pre-built integrations with popular tools and environments used by enterprises today including Kubernetes, Terraform, vRealize and many cloud platforms. This is essential for end-to-end automation.
Compliance & Security
Infrastructure as code and policy engines allow teams to define and enforce compliance with organizational, industry and regulatory policies related to security, access and governance.
Automation reduces the risk of audit failures due to human errors in infrastructure management processes according to research from IDC.
Monitoring & Analytics
Advanced analytics provide real-time and historical visibility into infrastructure automation workflows. Teams can identify inefficiencies and optimize processes over time.
Example KPIs Tracked Through Automation:
- Provisioning times
- Uptime/availability
- Anomaly detections
- Cost by stack, layer or resource
- Utilization rates
Self-Service Access
Easy-to-use self-service portals and APIs allow other teams to tap into infrastructure automation capabilities. This drives developer productivity and leverages automation expertise across the business.
According to Gartner, employees spend up to 20% of time waiting on IT instead of focusing on core job tasks. Self-service access helps resolve this bottleneck.
Economic Value
In addition to operational efficiency and agility gains, infrastructure automation delivers compelling financial value through:
- Capital cost reductions – Optimized resource usage reduces infrastructure spend
- Labor cost reductions – Automating manual tasks allows IT teams to focus on innovation vs repetitive maintenance
- Compliance cost reductions – Reduce audit preparation time and lower risk of failures
According to research from EMA:
- 75% of organizations achieved direct infrastructure cost reductions through automation
- 65% improved IT productivity and labor efficiencies
Real-World Use Cases
Here are some examples of how leading organizations across industries are using infrastructure automation to transform IT operations:
Retail
A large retailer needed to rapidly provision infrastructure globally to support pop-up stores and seasonal capacity changes. Using infrastructure automation, they can instantly spin up standardized stacks on-demand which provides the flexibility their business requires.
Finance
A multinational bank pursuing a cloud-first strategy still had some workloads on legacy systems. Infrastructure automation provided a single plane of glass to manage and orchestrate infrastructure across old and new environments in a compliant, secure manner.
Healthcare
A hospital group implementing electronic health records needed to quickly onboard regional facilities. By templateizing infrastructure stacks for various facility sizes, new locations can now be configured in just 1 day instead of 6 weeks.
More Use Cases
While above examples showcase some common scenarios, infrastructure automation use cases are expanding to support more advanced needs:
IoT / Edge Computing
Automation tools now allow IT teams to remotely provision infrastructure at edge locations based on policies. This simplifies massive deployments of edge infrastructure as part of IoT initiatives.
Serverless
As adoption of serverless computing for certain workloads accelerates, infrastructure automation solutions have emerged that help manage and optimize these environments. This helps users focus on the functions instead of the infrastructure underneath serverless platforms.
Business Continuity
Leading disaster recovery solutions leverage automation to orchestrate failover/failback processes and replications of on-prem workloads. Users define policies that determine recovery priorities and runtime environments.
Best Practices for Implementation
Here are some top recommendations for organizations looking to leverage infrastructure automation:
Start Small – Focus automation on repetitive tasks or critical bottlenecks first before expanding efforts. Quick wins build confidence and momentum internally.
Standardize – Standardized, modular stacks using infrastructure-as-code allow for consistent deployments across environments. Maintain DRY principles within libraries or catalogs.
Instrument Analytics – Tracking key performance indicators related to provisioning times, uptime, anomalies etc unlocks powerful continuous improvement opportunities.
Enable Self-Service – Empower developers, data engineers, site reliability engineers and IT generalists to tap into infrastructure automation capabilities through portals, APIs while maintaining guardrails.
Integrate Security – Build compliance policies into automation workflows from the start to ensure security and regulatory standards are upheld.
Clean Before Automating – Eliminate redundant or outdated resources that won‘t be managed moving forward. This reduces complexities when automating at-scale.
Evaluating Solutions
With infrastructure automation gaining rapid enterprise adoption, the landscape of vendors and solutions is maturing quickly. Here are some key capabilities to look for when evaluating options:
Multi-Cloud Support
The tool should support management of popular environments like AWS, Azure and GCP using native APIs and purpose-built connectors.
Pre-Built Templates
The solution should offer an extensive library of pre-built templates and blueprints tailored to enterprise workload needs that serve as starting points for provisioning resources.
Security & Compliance
Capabilities to apply governance rules and enforce organizational policies related to access controls, encryption etc. help reduce risks as complexity rises.
Automated Remediation
The ability for the tool to automatically roll back changes or auto-remediate infrastructure when deviations from desired state occur is extremely valuable.
Integrations
Choose solutions that integrate seamlessly with complementary solutions used within the organization – ITSM tools, SCM tools, clouds – enabling end-to-end automation.
Comparing Leading Tools
The infrastructure automation landscape has seen incredible innovation recently. Here’s an overview of capabilities across some leading solutions:
Terraform – Codifies provisioning processes enabling consistent deployments across providers. Provides module reuse and works with both public and private cloud infrastructure.
Ansible – Agentless automation using simple YAML templates. Takes broad automation approach beyond just infrastructure across networks, storage, security. Integrates easily with CI/CD pipelines.
Puppet – Robust solution for on-prem and hybrid infrastructure focused on configuration management. Lacks cloud support natively but can be extended through Bolt project. Declarative language can have a steep learning curve.
Salt – Specializes in remote execution for simple yet powerful automation of infrastructure and app deployments. Used mostly for greenfield cloud implementations vs managing legacy environments.
vRealize Automation – End-to-end infrastructure automation leveraging VMware virtualization widely adopted by enterprises. Requires VMware stack so more vendor lock-in than open source options.
Overcoming Common Automation Challenges
While benefits clearly exist, infrastructure automation initiatives also face common barriers. Here is how leading organizations overcome them:
Talent Shortages – Make small steps incrementally while upskilling teams. Many opt for third-party support from MSPs or professional services firms to accelerate efforts.
Legacy Constraints – Start by targeting automation capabilities towards newer areas of IT environment before circling back to modernize legacy. Prioritize based on cost/risk profile.
Cultural Resistance – Socialize success stories from early pilots. Involve all stakeholders early to increase buy-in. Clarify automation augments talent rather than replaces it.
Unrealistic Expectations – Set clear milestones calibrated to complexity factors. Manage expectations by communicating assumptions and constraints transparently from outset.
Sample Infrastructure Automation Architecture
Here is one example of a common infrastructure automation architecture leveraging various composable capabilities:
Key components:
Orchestration Engine – Central automation engine handling scheduling, sequencing and coordination of workflows
Configuration Management – Stores desired state configuration policies and controls drift
Infrastructure Module Library – Catalog of standardized scripts or templates for provisioning modular components
Self-Service Portal – Easy interface for users across organization to access infrastructure automation capabilities
Tools & Connectors – Pre-built integration support for complementary platforms like ServiceNow, Jira, Terraform etc.
Analytics – Dashboards providing visibility into performance, utilization and operations
The Road Ahead
As complexity continues rising while business demands ever greater agility from technology, infrastructure automation will likely play an even more pivotal role in years to come. Here are two trends worth noting:
AI Driven Automation – Expect to see the emergence of smarter infrastructure automation solutions powered by artificial intelligence as the technology continues maturing in the enterprise space over next decade. Vendors will train machine learning models on millions of historical decisions and user data points to drive breakthrough levels of automation beyond what rules alone can achieve.
Extensibility Explosion – Leading solutions will continue extending automation capabilities beyond just infrastructure resources to support related processes spanning project management, finance operations, customer support etc. This will deliver compounding efficiency through increasingly connected workflows.
There has never been a better time to leverage infrastructure automation as enterprises push the pedal on digital transformation. Organizations that embrace automation will be best positioned to harness complexity and accelerate innovation in the future.
