How to Select an Infrastructure Automation Vendor
Forrester’s recent “Infrastructure Automation Landscape” report dives into the business value, adoption challenges, and market dynamics associated with infrastructure automation. Explore the key tips for future-fit leaders looking to select a vendor.
By: Kristen H. Rachels , Chief Marketing Officer at Itential
To be future-fit, organizations are investing in automation at scale. Forrester names “holistic infrastructure automation” as a necessity for those looking to get the most out of their IT infrastructure. Below, we break down how the landscape is evolving and what leaders can do to invest in the right vendor.
Infrastructure Automation: A Mature & Growing Market
In their recent “Infrastructure Automation Landscape” report, Forrester notes that tech leaders implement infrastructure automation to “go to market faster and optimize return on investment; improve productivity; and ensure large-scale compliance.” But as plenty of IT teams and leadership have experienced, adoption doesn’t always deliver smoothly. Each IT department takes its own approach to automation, creating gaps between their processes and leaving potential efficiency gains on the table.
Forrester’s attention landing on infrastructure automation is a big signal that the market has matured and broadened to a point where leaders can feel confident investment will pay off. But to see real value, it’s vital that tech leaders choose a vendor that can manage challenges like tech heterogeneity and infrastructure complexity all while adapting to business needs.
How to Meet the Future Head-On: Forrester’s Assessment
But how do you know you’re choosing the right vendor?
It’s just a fact that IT infrastructure today is bigger and more complex than it’s ever been. The collection of assorted services, platforms, and technologies an organization has adopted and developed over its IT lifespan is expanding all the time, even as demand for more speed and more scale and more security only grows. How do you manage IT infrastructure that’s so critical but remains a disparate collection of individual teams with their own automations and their own platforms? You need an infrastructure automation solution that focuses on integration.
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“Automation is easiest when firms get technology from one vendor, but that’s far from reality. Companies buy infrastructure from many vendors with a broad range of maturity levels and different operating models, making automation both necessary and difficult to implement.”
In the report, Forrester states that “broad adoption” of automation has been made “difficult” by “technology heterogeneity, complexity, and scale; a lack of tech skills; and ongoing tension between specialized, best-of-breed automation tools and broader automation solutions.” The right vendor is one that can rise up to those challenges and deliver an infrastructure automation solution that enables real efficiency and functionality across different IT systems and domains.
An Integrated Solution for Complex Infrastructure
As each branch of IT infrastructure grows more complex and invests in building its own set of automation tools, each separate from one another, a method of unifying the entire system is needed for organizations to manage infrastructure in an agile and adaptable way. Platforms that take an integration-first approach make adoption of new tools or domains easier and allow organizations to rapidly select new platforms and switch out vendors without major costs. Further, when a platform can ingest existing automations that IT teams already use, adoption is smoother and organizations avoid costly, time-consuming reskilling and rebuilding for key areas of their infrastructure.
In the report, Forrester lists Itential among its notable infrastructure automation vendors for its integration and exposure capabilities. Itential takes a unique approach – our platform is designed to enable teams across IT to expose their assets for consumption by whatever users they choose, increasing the value of IT investment organizations have already made while providing the ground for significant return on future investments. Click here to learn more about how Itential delivers a leading solution for IT infrastructure automation.
If you’d like to see what Itential’s holistic, end-to-end automation solution can bring to your organization, you can test drive Itential for free or request a custom demo of our platform. Download your complimentary copy of the report to dive deeper into Forrester’s infrastructure automation insights.
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