Containers, DevOps, IT automation seen as antidotes to complexity

More than seven in 10 executives and professionals believe that if they don't automate a good part of their IT operations soon, their businesses will not survive the decade.

That's the key takeaway of a new survey of 654 IT executives and professionals by BMC Software. Business process automation has been proliferating across enterprises for years now, but the pressure is on for IT shops to automate themselves as well. With the rise of digital business, and the artificial intelligence, analytics, real-time capabilities it requires, things are getting too complex for the manual procedures still seen in many IT development and operations.

Along these lines, containerization is the top investment priority for IT executives and professionals over the next 24 months. would like to invest in are containerization, workload automation/scheduling and DevOps, the survey shows.

Interest is running high in DevOps, or the embedded, institutionalized cooperation and coordination between those writing the software and those deploying it into production. DevOps has gained traction across most enterprises, the survey shows. One-third employ DevOps across most their teams, and 24 percent report it's an end-to-end endeavor. Only 19% indicate they either don't use DevOps at this time or are unaware of it.

Issues hindering coordination between IT and their business counterparts include conflicting objectives between business units (42 percent) and 33 percent say there is a "lack of motivation" among business units. Budget and skills issues hamper the digitization efforts of half of the enterprises involved.

Just about everybody, 94 percent of IT decision makers, agree that within the next three years, IT automation will have spread to other areas of the business, "transforming everything." Fifty percent of IT executives say digital transformation is their biggest item on their agendas, and 45 percent say just about every part of their business is involved.

IT leaders are confident that IT automation will help fulfill the challenges of building and running a digital enterprise. The study found that 88 percent of IT decision makers feel they are empowered to deliver the required IT innovation to drive digital business transformation and bridge this gap, and 77 percent of respondents believe that businesses are doing enough to prepare and train the workforce with greater automation skills.