IT automation growth accelerates

Stonebranch has published the inaugural Stonebranch 2022 Global State of IT Automation report. Developed in partnership with IEEE Computer Society, the premier technical education organization, this study collects the perspectives of automation-focused IT professionals worldwide.

Respondents, all from companies with over 1000 employees, shared their views about automation and orchestration as it relates to cloud, data pipelines, IT operations, self-service enablement, and more.

“Stonebranch is proud to share this important report — the first of its kind in the IT automation industry,” said Giuseppe Damiani, CEO at Stonebranch. “This research serves as a window into how the best and brightest industry practitioners plan to evolve their IT automation programs. Most importantly, the report illustrates a shift from IT automation to IT orchestration, which is driven by the continued growth of cloud, multi-cloud, and overall hybrid IT environments.”

The research indicates that orchestration is critical for successful hybrid IT environments, which have taken the lead for mid-size and large enterprises alike. Nearly half (46%) of respondents work in a hybrid IT environment comprised of on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, and containerized microservices. This number far exceeds on-premises only (31%) and cloud-only (23%) environments.

“Siloed automation programs may have worked when only targeting on-premises servers, mainframes, and applications,” said Peter Baljet, CTO at Stonebranch. “However, the cloud — both public and private — added a whole new layer of complexity, requiring organizations to think through how they orchestrate automated workflows that span between both on-premises and cloud environments.”

Additional key findings in the Stonebranch 2022 Global State of IT Automation report include:

Automation growth is driven by cloud adoption. Most enterprises (69%) automate cloud applications and platforms, as well as containers.

Multi-cloud environments are the norm. 92% of enterprises use more than two public cloud service providers in day-to-day operations. Additionally, 91% automate data transfers between multiple public cloud providers.

Service orchestration and automation platforms (SOAP) have grown in popularity. 43% of enterprises will invest in SOAP by the end of 2022, only two years after Gartner coined the SOAP category in 2020.

Self-service automation creates citizen automators. 93% of enterprises have a centralized IT automation team. 84% offer a self-service IT automation portal to business users, data teams, and developers.

Data pipeline orchestration relies heavily on cloud. 90% of enterprises have more than half of their data tools in the cloud.

Integration is key to orchestration. 78% of enterprises change data sources or tools that they automate at least quarterly, if not more often.