Report: 85% of SREs say that automation is ‘imperative’ for innovation

A new report by Dynatrace indicates that as organizations continue to evolve their digital transformation roadmaps, the proliferation of new applications, services and software products being launched and updated introduce mounting complexities in cloud ecosystems and IT infrastructures.

Enter site reliability engineering (SRE). Businesses today are increasingly turning to SRE teams to drive greater alignment between development teams and to define the best practices that will enable various teams within an organization to automate processes at scale and ensure goals for business, security, quality, and performance, are all met equally.

Despite this growing reliance, SREs are still bogged down by manual labor and large amounts of time spent addressing the security vulnerabilities and application failures that come with the multiplying number of applications, microservices and software products that expand existing cloud ecosystems. That’s why 85% of SREs report that the scalability of SRE practices will be extremely dependent on the availability of automation and AIops capabilities. Both are needed to accelerate innovation and transformation while alleviating some of the processes that typically require time-consuming manual effort.

Minimizing time spent on these efforts will help SREs evolve into the more critical role businesses are giving them when it comes to digital transformation strategy. In fact, 88% of SREs surveyed claim to have a better understanding and recognition of the strategic responsibility that comes with their role in comparison to three years ago, especially as organizations tackle new challenges including the growth of new technologies, languages, platforms and tools in cloud-native delivery that’ve created an explosion of complexity.

The findings are based on a global survey commissioned by Dynatrace and conducted by Coleman Parkes, which gathered responses from 450 SREs in large enterprises across various regions, including 150 in the U.S., 150 in EMEA, and 150 in Asia Pacific.

Read the full report by Dynatrace.