Infrastructure Leaders Rethink Delivery and Orchestration
The recent blog post discusses the need for infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to adapt their strategies to keep pace with evolving demands. It emphasizes the importance of rethinking delivery models, embracing orchestration, and fostering self-service capabilities.
Delivery Model Challenges
I&O leaders are currently facing heightened pressure to enhance service delivery speed, enable self-service options, ensure compliance governance, and incorporate automation technologies. Achieving these goals has proven challenging due to the limitations of traditional automation methods, which are described as fragmented and outdated.
The 2025 Market Guide for Infrastructure Automation & Orchestration Tools by Gartner highlights that a mere 23% of organizations have effectively integrated automation into their service delivery, leading to operational inefficiencies known as “islands of automation.” This situation represents a growing need for a comprehensive model that aligns with modern digital organizational structures.
Infrastructure as a Product
Transitioning from simple automation to a product-oriented mindset in infrastructure is vital. This means treating infrastructure like a product rather than merely automating tasks. To achieve this, I&O leaders are encouraged to build reusable services, expose automation through APIs, and empower internal users for self-service.
Key components for realizing this model include orchestration across workflows, integration within the IT ecosystem, and solid governance practices to ensure security and compliance. These elements are essential as teams encounter difficulties integrating tools that were not designed to work cohesively.
The Role of Orchestration
Orchestration is critical for successful infrastructure delivery at scale. It facilitates the connection of disparate tools and teams, the standardization of service processes, and supports the implementation of self-service and platform engineering initiatives. Moreover, effective orchestration allows organizations to leverage insights from generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a controlled manner.
According to Gartner, a platform’s ability to orchestrate across hybrid environments is essential, as automation serves as a starting point while orchestration plays a key role in scalability.
Preparing for AI Integration
AI is expected to play a significant role in infrastructure management. However, without a robust orchestration framework, initiatives utilizing AI may lead to further fragmentation. Organizations need steps in place that convert AI-driven insights into actionable infrastructure changes without additional complexities.
The absence of orchestration may result in further operational noise, undermining the benefits that could be achieved through AI technologies.
Conclusion
The blog post concludes that I&O leaders need platforms rather than just additional tools to enhance their operational capabilities. Such platforms should operationalize existing automation, streamline processes across teams, and deliver infrastructure as a product to meet business expectations. Itital has been addressing these requirements in its efforts.