Automation Priorities for 2025: A practical guide

As organizations face increasingly complex IT environments, the urgency to operationalize automation is at an all-time high. From deploying modern automation platforms to refining asset lifecycle management, 2025 is the year to stop planning and start doing.

This guide breaks down the top automation priorities and how to act on them. Each priority ties directly to real business outcomes like increased agility and efficiency, and reduced operational risk.

Priority #1: Build an automation platform as a source of truth

A source of truth acts as the foundation for scalable automation. It's a centralized platform that unifies asset and configuration data, making automation consistent and reliable across the entire IT estate.

Why does it matter? The right automation platform can help you avoid configuration drift while reducing manual effort. It can also strengthen audit readiness and visibility while speeding up incident response.

Steps to take:

Choose the right automation platform for your environment — whether open-source, commercial or custom.
Focus on ingesting clean, validated data.
Embed the platform in day-to-day IT workflows and make it the single point of decision-making.
A mature source of truth improves every automation effort that follows, especially when integrated with existing tools and policies.

Priority #2: Automate IT asset lifecycle management

With assets now spanning clouds, geographies and OEMs, manual processes just don't scale any longer. Automating IT asset lifecycle management is one of the fastest ways to connect IT strategy with business goals.

The benefits of automation include streamlined provisioning and decommissioning, lower operational costs and better asset utilization, and improved sustainability through smarter resource use.

How to start:

Quantify the value: Show how automation can reduce time and risk.
Pick a targeted use case, like zero-touch provisioning or license management.
Align automation with key events like hardware refreshes, cloud migrations or compliance deadlines.

Measure success by:

Cost savings and reduced downtime.
Faster delivery of IT services.
Increased visibility into asset health and status.

Explore the report to see how WWT helps clients modernize asset lifecycle management.

Priority #3: Automate AI infrastructure from the ground up

AI-ready infrastructure is demanding, especially when managing GPU resources, containerized workloads and large-scale model testing. Automation is essential to optimizing these types of workload-intensive environments.

Our automation priorities for AI include:

Adopting Kubernetes as the deployment foundation.
Using GPU-aware scheduling and resource orchestration.
Implementing continuous, automated testing in your CI/CD pipeline.

The full report details how WWT helps organizations optimize infrastructure for AI workloads. Our approaches reducing idle time, speeding deployment and driving down total cost of ownership.

Priority #4: Embrace full-context operations

Modern observability and AIOps demand full-context operations — that is, the integration of monitoring data with historical and business insights.

Steps to implement:

Start by mapping and monitoring a critical user journey.
Attribute business value to key IT systems.
Define RED metrics (Rate, Errors, Duration) to baseline system health.
Encourage collaboration across infrastructure, DevOps and support teams.

Learn how WWT is helping clients integrate observability, AIOps and automation in the full report.

Move from strategy to execution

WWT offers the tools and guidance to help you operationalize automation in 2025 and beyond. You can:

Explore our Automation Services.
Attend on-demand automation briefings.
Access learning paths and certifications.
And more!

Phillip Palmer

About Phillip