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Hybrid IT Usage Doubles

Companies prefer a mix of on-prem and cloud environments, according to the 2024 Global State of IT Automation Report from Stonebranch. In only one year, hybrid IT usage has doubled from 34% to 68%.

Organizations are deciding where to store data — either on-prem or cloud — on a case-by-case basis. This approach is efficient and flexible but poses a challenge when it comes to automating and orchestrating these environments.


Source: Stonebranch

Other key automation trends from the report include:

Automation is Evolving into Orchestration

Driven by a desire to orchestrate across complex hybrid IT environments, 82% of respondents plan to replace legacy IT automation tools or add new automation tools to the mix.

Democratization of Automation Continues to Grow

88% of respondents enable end-users across the business with self-service access to IT automation. Those who plan to add or replace IT automation tools with a more modern solution cited a desire to add self-service as the leading reason for change.

Machine Learning Pipelines are Evolving and Growing in Importance

A significant 74% of respondents have already incorporated data and ML pipelines to operationalize their AI-driven initiatives. This is an indicator of many companies' strong commitment to the pivotal role of AI in shaping their future success.

Peter Baljet, Stonebranch CTO, concludes, "Our findings show that companies are adapting their IT automation and orchestration strategies to meet the specific challenges that come with cloud technologies. In the complex world of today's hybrid IT environments, automation is crucial to enhance performance, secure systems, and control costs."

Methodology: The report is based on a survey of IT automation professionals and executives, conducted by Censuswide between January 24 – February 5, 2024.

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Hybrid IT Usage Doubles

Companies prefer a mix of on-prem and cloud environments, according to the 2024 Global State of IT Automation Report from Stonebranch. In only one year, hybrid IT usage has doubled from 34% to 68%.

Organizations are deciding where to store data — either on-prem or cloud — on a case-by-case basis. This approach is efficient and flexible but poses a challenge when it comes to automating and orchestrating these environments.


Source: Stonebranch

Other key automation trends from the report include:

Automation is Evolving into Orchestration

Driven by a desire to orchestrate across complex hybrid IT environments, 82% of respondents plan to replace legacy IT automation tools or add new automation tools to the mix.

Democratization of Automation Continues to Grow

88% of respondents enable end-users across the business with self-service access to IT automation. Those who plan to add or replace IT automation tools with a more modern solution cited a desire to add self-service as the leading reason for change.

Machine Learning Pipelines are Evolving and Growing in Importance

A significant 74% of respondents have already incorporated data and ML pipelines to operationalize their AI-driven initiatives. This is an indicator of many companies' strong commitment to the pivotal role of AI in shaping their future success.

Peter Baljet, Stonebranch CTO, concludes, "Our findings show that companies are adapting their IT automation and orchestration strategies to meet the specific challenges that come with cloud technologies. In the complex world of today's hybrid IT environments, automation is crucial to enhance performance, secure systems, and control costs."

Methodology: The report is based on a survey of IT automation professionals and executives, conducted by Censuswide between January 24 – February 5, 2024.

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Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...

Cloud computing has transformed how we build and scale software, but it has also quietly introduced one of the most persistent challenges in modern IT: cost visibility and control ... So why, after more than a decade of cloud adoption, are cloud costs still spiraling out of control? The answer lies not in tooling but in culture ...

CEOs are committed to advancing AI solutions across their organization even as they face challenges from accelerating technology adoption, according to the IBM CEO Study. The survey revealed that executive respondents expect the growth rate of AI investments to more than double in the next two years, and 61% confirm they are actively adopting AI agents today and preparing to implement them at scale ...

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