Many infrastructure technology teams believe they have achieved infrastructure automation excellence, but a new report from Spacelift reveals a significant gap between perception and reality. The State of Infrastructure Automation report presents findings from a Panterra survey of 413 infrastructure decision-makers and purchase influencers, highlighting key challenges in automation adoption and execution.

Key Findings:

• Automation Perception vs. Reality: While 45% of organizations believe they have a high level of infrastructure automation, only 14% demonstrate true leadership in the space.
• Speed-Control Paradox: Organizations struggle to balance rapid deployment with governance, a crucial challenge for achieving automation excellence.
• Maturity Shifts Focus: Leaders prioritize control and governance, while less mature organizations focus on speed. Among Leaders, 83% report most of their infrastructure is automated with built-in security, compliance, and scalability.
• Infrastructure-as-Code and Testing: Leaders are more than twice as likely to implement Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) best practices and over three times as likely to use automated testing for infrastructure changes.
• Platform Engineering Adoption: 29% of Leaders have platform engineering teams, compared to just 7% of total respondents.
• Deployment Efficiency: Leading organizations are twice as likely to deploy infrastructure correctly on the first try, four times as likely to provision new resources within four hours, and five times as likely to deploy changes daily or multiple times a day. More than 50% of organizations take a week or longer to deploy infrastructure changes, and 43% must rerun deployments multiple times to get them right.
• Developer Experience: 61% of Leaders have streamlined workflows and reduced friction, compared to 45% overall.

Infrastructure Automation Leadership Index

Spacelift and Panterra developed the Infrastructure Automation Leadership Index to categorize organizations into four maturity stages:

• Experimenter: Early adopters testing automation tools with some manual workflows.
• Adopter: Organizations integrating automation into infrastructure strategy but struggling with governance.
• Optimizer: Streamlined deployments with improved governance, though gaps remain in security, compliance, and scalability.
• Leader: Fully automated infrastructure with built-in security, compliance, and scalability.

Spacelift offers a free self-assessment tool to help organizations determine their ranking on the Infrastructure Automation Leadership Index.

“Even with good tools and a platform team, balancing speed and control remains a challenge,” said Pawel Hytry, CEO of Spacelift. “Leaders stand out by striking a balance between rapid deployments, developer self-service, and governance.”

Spacelift will be at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in London from April 1-4. Attendees can visit booth N560 and join Spacelift at OpenTofu Day on April 1.