TECHNOLOGY
Siloed automation and tool proliferation drain resources and money
Duncan is an award-winning editor with more than 20 years experience in journalism. Having launched his tech journalism career as editor of Arabian Computer News in Dubai, he has since edited an array of tech and digital marketing publications, including Computer Business Review, TechWeekEurope, Figaro Digital, Digit and Marketing Gazette.
CloudBolt Software, the leader in automating, optimising, and governing hybrid-cloud, multi-tool environments for global enterprises, today released its latest research report, ‘The Truth About Siloed Automation’.
CloudBolt Industry Insights (CII) studies examine industry sentiment across specific hybrid- and multi-cloud dimensions. This eighth edition of CII, based on a survey of 350 senior IT and DevOps leaders at companies with 3,000+ employees, reveals the crippling impact of automation silos on cloud operations. The survey was conducted on the Pulse platform, a Gartner-owned research subsidiary.
The data paints a worrying picture: Automation silos are real, costly, and threaten business continuity. While most can access and share automations across their siloed teams, the larger promise of enterprise-wide automation efficiency and reuse is yet to be realised. More than half of organisations (57%) keep their automations within individual silos, with 75% pointing to silos of automation hampering their ability to unify cloud operations across functions, leading to inefficiencies and redundancies. And 77% share that business continuity is at a significant risk any time a vital member of the team leaves. Further, a vast majority (88%) agree that having all previous and new automations centralised in one place for the entire organisation will ensure compliance, bolster security, enable business continuity, encourage reuse, and reduce risk.
A deeper look into the automation siloes reveals:
- Growing Tool Overload: Teams have 27 different automation tools their organisations have deployed, using one or a few as they see fit, with little to no consistency across teams. This automation tool sprawl results in a “choice paradox” and pervasive lack of standardisation. Aside from suboptimal decision-making, teams have no easy or scalable ways to reuse best practices and templates across the organisation.
- Automation Silos Are Real, Costly, and Threaten Business Continuity: More than half (55%) of respondents point to having four or more automation teams across their organisations, with 95% of teams operating in their own silo. Among other factors, the lack of effective automation centralisation poses a significant risk to business continuity, especially when vital team members leave.
- The Promise Land: Enterprise leaders crave an overarching “home for all automations” to finally do away with reinventing the wheel across their organisations. Nine out of 10 tech leaders wish for one home for automations – a central enterprise-wide repository for tested and proven automations that can be easily shared and reused across teams, departments, and regions. The good news: 57% of respondents said they are already starting to act on this wish – having made centralised automation a key initiative or planning to do so in the near future.
CloudBolt CTO Rick Kilcoyne, said: “Our latest CII report reveals that today’s enterprises suffer from disconnected and disparate automation practices.
“To reap the full benefits of cloud automation, it is time IT teams acknowledge automation silos are real and establish an automation Center of Excellence (CoE) with the remit to unify the disparate pieces into a single repository for consistent re-use – accessible to all who need it.”
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