A new study found that the increased need for process automation and SREs has been fueled by companies’ increase in digital transformation initiatives as well as remote and hybrid work policies.
Industries have seen a 90% increase in customer-affecting issues and 68% of businesses reported an increased cost of downtime since the pandemic began.
Now, DevOps teams and SREs at organizations are struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of change, the report stated.
The State of DevOps Automation 2021 report was conducted by Transposit, a DevOps process orchestration company.
“Now, ITOps and software engineering teams including DevOps and SREs face increasing complexity in their work, leading to significantly more strain and downtime,” Transposit wrote in a post.
Companies are realizing that they need to have more SREs, which are essential for solving infrastructure and operational problems. As a result, 94% of respondents said they increased focus on SRE practices in their organization in the past 12 months and 42% plan to expand their SRE efforts in 2021.
However, nearly 80% of companies said that SREs have problems trying to solve incidents as they are occurring and nearly half said that this is due to a lack of automation.
Many organizations have invested in building custom bots for a particular use case with 40% of organizations having one or more full-time engineers working on custom in-house bots for automated incident response.
“Investing in reliable automation tools will help streamline traditionally manual processes and tasks and eliminate inefficiencies to improve operations and deliver value to customers. As companies ramp up their digital transformation initiatives and implement long-term remote work, having reliable automation in place can make every engineer as capable as the best engineer on the team and increase speed to resolution by providing repeatable and reliable processes,” said Tina Huang, CTO and founder of Transposit.
Organizations are also looking into finding the most effective ways to handle issues. Almost all respondents believed that systematically mining insights from human data (such as archived Slack communications, postmortem interviews, group feedback, etc.) could improve future incident response and improve operational excellence.
