The past few weeks have been busy for the Infrastructure and Operations research team at Gartner. We published two critical Market Guides related to IT automation.
We see automation as a key lever for efficiency gains, productivity improvements and cost savings.
Infrastructure Automation, in itself will not save you money, at least not in the short to medium term. However, what it will do is allow you to release expensive resources carrying out repetitive and manual activities to be more productive for the organisation.
That initial focus will also have the effect of reducing risks to the organisation by removing the “human element” from the activity.
Automation is to modern infrastructure what blood is to the body. It is core, you cannot have modern infrastructure without it. This will have the most impact and if done successfully will culminate in customer satisfaction and innovation. We recommend starting with smaller more defined initiatives and incrementally address larger more impactful initiatives.
Market Guide for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms
Service orchestration and automation platforms (SOAPs) enable I&O leaders to design and implement business services through a combination of workflow orchestration, run book automation and resource provisioning across an organization’s hybrid digital infrastructure. SOAPs provide a unified administration console and an orchestration engine to manage data pipelines and event-driven application workflows. Some tools expose APIs and include mobile apps for scheduling batch processes, monitoring task statuses and alerting users when new events are triggered.
SOAPs expand the role of traditional workload automation by adapting to cloud-native infrastructure and application architecture. These tools complement and integrate with DevOps toolchains to provide customer-focused agility in addition to cost-savings, operational efficiency and process standardization.
Market Guide for Infrastructure Automation Tools
Infrastructure automation (IA) tools enable DevOps and I&O teams to design and implement self-service, automated delivery services across on-premises and IaaS environments. IA tools enable DevOps and I&O teams to manage the life cycle of services through creation, configuration, operation and retirement. These infrastructure services are then exposed via API integrations to complement broader DevOps toolchains or are consumed via a centralized administration console.
Infrastructure automation tools provide DevOps teams with on-demand, self-service access to standardized environments. Adopting these tools enhances their ability to deliver customer-focused agility and velocity improvements while consuming new technology platforms with limited disruption. IA tools also enable operational efficiency, policy compliance, and cost and process optimization.
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