Infrastructure automation has been around for years, so you’d think most enterprises would have it mastered by now. But in my conversations with infrastructure leaders, a different reality emerges. Again and again, I hear the same questions: Where do we stand compared to others? Are we doing automation right? How do we get to the next level?
To answer these questions, we surveyed over 400 infrastructure decision-makers and influencers to uncover the real state of infrastructure automation today. Of those decision-makers and influencers, 46% described themselves as IT leaders, 23% identified as CIOs/CTOs, 17% were categorized as line-of-business managers, and 14% had roles as IT directors/managers.
The result is the 2025 Infrastructure Automation Report, and the findings might surprise you.
One of the most striking insights from our research is the gap between perception and reality. 45% of organizations believe they’ve achieved a high level of infrastructure automation, yet only 14% actually demonstrate the behaviors of true automation excellence.
What I find most compelling about the survey revelations — and what the report addresses in detail — is the critical challenge facing infrastructure leaders: balancing the need for speed with the requirement for control. In the pursuit of rapid deployment, many teams have sacrificed security, governance, and operational stability. This disconnect is what we call the Speed-Control Paradox — teams push for faster automation but end up sacrificing control, leading to drift, outages, and security risks.
In fact, 50% of companies take a week or more to deploy infrastructure changes in production, and 43% need to rerun deployments more than four times before they get them right. I don’t think this is the type of speed or control most would consider successful.
The good news is successful organizations — those we classify as “Leaders” — have found a way to break free from this Speed-Control Paradox, achieving both speed and control. Their success offers a blueprint for others to follow.
The report uncovered clear patterns among the most automation-mature organizations — those who have mastered the Speed-Control Paradox:
- Developer self-service with guardrails: Leaders empower developers to deploy infrastructure independently while embedding safeguards. They have built high-velocity environments where developers can focus on building rather than troubleshooting: 61% of Leaders have streamlined workflows and reduced friction, compared to 8% of companies who are classified as just getting started with infrastructure automation.
- Platform engineering for consistency: Leaders are five times more likely to have implemented a platform engineering team than their less-advanced peers: 29% of Leaders have implemented platform teams compared to just 7% of total respondents. Leaders don’t rely on ad-hoc automation; they establish dedicated platform teams to create standardized workflows and reusable templates, ensuring consistency across environments.
- Security as a built-in foundation: More than half (58%) of Leaders have cut security incidents, and 56% report fewer compliance violations versus 36% of total respondents. Leaders integrate automated security checks, policy enforcement, and drift detection into every stage of their automation pipeline. Security is not an afterthought; it is a continuous, proactive process.
- Cost optimization as a priority: Leaders view cost efficiency as essential to business success: 51% of Leaders cite cost savings and ROI as a top business metric, compared to 41% of respondents overall. By leveraging automated cost estimation and policy enforcement to curb overprovisioning and prevent waste, 47% of Leaders have successfully reduced infrastructure costs, compared to 32% of all respondents.
- Orchestration over automation: The most advanced teams go beyond tool adoption. They orchestrate the entire infrastructure lifecycle — provisioning, configuration, security, and governance — into a unified, automated pipeline. This end-to-end orchestration is what drives true automation maturity and results like these: Leading companies are twice as likely to get infrastructure deployments right on the first try, four times more likely to provision new resources in four hours or less, and five times more likely to deploy changes in production daily or multiple times a day. In contrast, over 50% of organizations take a week or more to deploy infrastructure changes in production, and 43% need to rerun their infrastructure deployments more than four times to get it right.
So how can organizations get a clear picture of where they stand? We built the Infrastructure Automation Leadership Index to help teams objectively measure their automation maturity. This framework tracks capabilities across three core areas: speed, control, and collaboration.
The index has four categories:
- Experimenters – Just getting started, testing automation tools in isolated areas
- Adopters – Expanding automation but struggling with standardization and governance
- Optimizers – More mature workflows, but still facing security and scalability gaps
- Leaders – Automation is fully integrated, with security, compliance, and governance built into every process.
Want to understand where your organization stands in the index? We built a free self-assessment tool consisting of five questions to help you find out. Take the assessment here.
Our goal was to equip the community with research and tools to objectively assess their automation maturity and gain insights from industry leaders to build a personalized roadmap to excellence. I hope you find the report as informative and valuable as I do.
Download your copy, take the free assessment, and start your journey to infrastructure automation excellence today.
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