The Illusion of Infrastructure Automation Maturity

The numbers tell an even more interesting story behind the scenes. Half of the organizations surveyed require a week or more to deploy infrastructure changes to production environments. Meanwhile, 43% admit they typically need to rerun deployments more than four times before getting them right. So much for automation efficiency!

These data points hint that, despite the widespread adoption of automation tools and technologies, many organizations fall into the trap of perceived maturity. 

Beneath the happy paths of adopting platforms and fancy tooling lies the reality of inefficiencies, security gaps, and missed opportunities. This illusion of progress not only masks critical risks but also hinders the realization of actual infrastructure automation efficiency.

As many IT decision-makers and leaders overestimate their IT automation maturity, they fail to identify gaps and invest in refining their automation strategies. Ultimately, they believe that the level they have achieved is good enough. 

Not assessing metrics holistically

The illusion is often compounded by the lack of clear metrics for assessing automation success or, as we see often, vanity metrics and KPIs that are easily gameable. Several metrics, such as the DORA metrics, can be leveraged by organizations to track the success of their automation efforts. Many of these organizations often over-index on specific metrics, which might not tell the whole story. 

For example, striving to improve deployment frequency is pointless if the change failure rate is high. It would mean introducing many errors we need to fix, adding a lot of rework, and ultimately slowing down the innovation pace.

All these metrics should be reviewed and assessed holistically to prevent gains in one area from negatively affecting another.

Adoption of tools without a clear strategy

Another common pitfall contributing to this illusion is the tendency of organizations to adopt multiple fancy new tools without a cohesive strategy, which leads to increased inefficiencies, silos, operational complexity, and cognitive load for developers and platform teams. 

This often creates fragmentation between existing legacy tools and flows and improperly integrated newer tooling, undermining automation efforts. It’s important to note here that tool adoption doesn’t immediately equal automation maturity. 

Starting to use tools such as Terraform or Ansible is a good start, but they don’t deliver the benefits of end-to-end infrastructure orchestration and true automation excellence on their own.

Neglecting Day-2 operations

Part of this misconception is based on the disproportionate focus teams put on automating initial provisioning efforts, thinking they have done their jobs and achieved their automation outcomes. Frequently, many teams neglect to automate tasks further down the infrastructure lifecycle, such as ongoing maintenance, security patching, observability, and optimizations, leaving them in a state of half-automated workflows.

Regarding the speed of value creation and deployments, the Spacelift 2025 Infrastructure Automation Report showed clear benefits for those who master true automation and orchestration. Leaders are more likely to get deployments right the first time, provision resources faster, and deploy changes in production multiple times a day. 

To achieve these high standards of speed delivery, it is important to implement a balanced and well-architected observability strategy across an organization, enabled by real-time monitoring that many companies lack.

Lack of embedded security and governance

Infrastructure automation governance at scale is not easy, especially if you don’t have the right tools, mindset, strategy, and teams in place. Insufficient policies, testing, and guardrails around security and operational standards lead to errors and vulnerabilities, adding extra toil for teams and regularly requiring redeployments and rollbacks. 

According to the report, leaders embrace security and compliance, integrating them deeply into their automation approach. Among high-achieving organizations, 93% have invested in automated testing, with 83% of them using security scanning, and 81% enforcing version control for infrastructure as code workflows. 

Comparing these numbers with those of organizations with less advanced automation, we see a clear pattern.

To overcome the illusion of infrastructure automation maturity, organizations must address systemic gaps through strategic interventions grounded in objective assessment and cultural transformation.

Objective benchmarking and assessment

The first step in improving is to understand your current state clearly. Find where you stand using the Infrastructure Automation Leadership Index, using the self-assessment tool provided to benchmark your current automation capabilities. This exercise can unearth gaps and weaknesses and help you validate your strengths and areas you should focus on.

Shift security and compliance left with automation

It is essential to incorporate security and compliance directly into the automation process, rather than addressing them as secondary concerns. Organizations can adopt tools and workflows that enable them to detect and resolve security vulnerabilities swiftly, preventing these issues from escalating to production. 

By leveraging approaches such as policy as code, vulnerability scanning tools, observability systems, and testing frameworks, you can automate infrastructure security and proactively address potential issues early in the development cycle.

Adopt orchestration and platform engineering practices

Becoming an industry leader in infrastructure automation maturity requires a blend of self-service agility and centralized governance. 

Prioritize developer autonomy with self-service infrastructure provisioning principles through templated workflows, cutting approval and waiting times. Of course, this additional speed needs to be balanced with the proper guardrails and controls, enforced by a central platform engineering team. 

Another key element is centralized standardization for templates and environments that provide reusable components to teams. Tools such as Terraform modules or Kubernetes operators promote reusability. 

Many organizations overestimate their automation maturity, leading to inefficiencies, risks, and missed opportunities. To bridge this gap, use objective maturity models to continuously evaluate your automation practices, invest in platform engineering and orchestration, and balance speed with centralized governance.

Automation excellence is a journey, not a destination. By committing to ongoing improvement and aligning your practices with measurable outcomes, your organization can unlock automation’s full potential. 

Remember, true maturity isn’t defined by the tools you use but by the behaviors and results you exhibit. Keep striving for progress, and let automation be a catalyst for innovation and growth.