Hype Cycle for Infrastructure & Operations Automation
Chris Saunderson, Gartner

Today's I&O professionals who are looking towards the future are using automation to increase business agility, fast-track the time to market, optimize maintenance costs and ensure compliance. However, success in automation requires a smart strategy and investment in the right tools and technologies.
Overview
Key findings:
- By 2025, 70% of organizations will complement continuous delivery of applications with continuous infrastructure automation to improve business agility, which is a significant increase from fewer than 20% in 2021.
- By 2025, 30% of enterprises will have implemented artificial intelligence (AI)-augmented development and testing strategies, which is a major increase from 5% in 2021.
- By 2025, 70% of organizations will implement structured infrastructure automation to deliver flexibility and efficiency, which is a significant increase from 20% in 2021.
- By 2025, 25% of enterprises will automate more than half of their network activities, an increase from fewer than 8% of enterprises in early 2022.
- By 2025, 40% of organizations will implement chaos engineering practices as part of site reliability engineering (SRE) initiatives, improving mean time to repair (MTTR) by an average of 90%.
Recommendations:
I&O leaders responsible for automation must:
- Create a service-oriented automation strategy based on delivering a “platform as a product”.
- Increase agile skills in I&O teams to drive continuous delivery improvement.
- Highlight the value of I&O automation initiatives through a formalized communication program.
- Adopt a use-case-driven approach to intelligent automation (IA) tools and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) platforms.
- Expand automated pipelines to deliver infrastructure services.
Download the Gartner Hype Cycle for I&O Automation 2022 report on what innovations to look out for and what action plan to follow for today's I&O professionals.