Infrastructure has always been the backbone of IT Operations, but its scope has expanded dramatically. Gone are the days when infrastructure meant only racks of on-premise servers and storage arrays. For many businesses, today's reality is a sprawling, interconnected landscape encompassing multi-cloud environments, modern software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms, traditional data centers, and emerging edge workloads. This rapid, decentralized expansion presents a formidable challenge for those tasked with managing the estates. IT practitioners must ensure availability, architect and maintain capacity, and optimize performance across increasingly complex, hybrid landscapes – all while preserving cost efficiency and a unified security posture.
Yet at present, most infrastructure teams are not set up for success. They remain bogged down by fragmented tooling, manual interventions, and reactive firefighting.
With systems distributed across clouds and regions, even routine tasks like patching or provisioning remain excruciatingly painful due to time-consuming bottlenecks.
This leads to slower response times, higher operational risk, and reduced confidence from the business.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
How ineffective infrastructure management can slow your business down
Complexity of environments
Gone are the days when most environments were a single, cohesive stack. Teams must now navigate a medley of disparate APIs, monitoring tools, and management consoles across evolving hybrid environments. Fragmentation creates inefficiencies and blind spots, making it harder to correlate events, enforce consistent policies, and maintain clear visibility across complex estates. IT professionals often find themselves switching between various consoles, reconciling conflicting alerts, and troubleshooting issues without a unified view. This exhausting, siloed cycle leads to slower resolution times and, ultimately, increases operational risk.
Scaling demands, scaling risk
Traditional capacity planning and resource allocation are often outpaced by the introduction of new workloads, such as AI training clusters, SaaS integrations, or regional expansions.
Inadequate capacity and availability management can result in service disruptions, performance bottlenecks, and increased operational costs.
Ensuring adequate IT capacity and availability amid growing operational demands, such as rapid data growth, evolving user expectations, and resource limitations, remains a challenge for many organisations. Ultimately, without orchestration, scaling can become either reactive or overprovisioned, leading directly to increased cost and risk.
The strain of configuration and patching
The expansion of IT estates also means you have a growing attack surface, with more vulnerabilities and additional compliance requirements to address. The sheer breadth of modern estates makes achieving effective configuration and patch management no easy feat. Gaps in version control, delayed rollouts, or risky ad‑hoc fixes can expose vulnerabilities, trigger unexpected outages, and leave compliance teams without the evidence they need. Inadequate configuration and patch management introduce unacceptable risk. A lack of orchestration often forces IT teams into reactive, rushed testing and costly, chaotic deployments across the entire ecosystem.
Monitoring and alert fatigue
As an estate evolves, so too does the volume of system events and logs. The burden this creates on infrastructure teams is very real. For example, according to the 2025 Tines Voice of Security report, 34% of respondents cited “managing data overload to ease alert fatigue” as a top priority for automation. At the same time, only 33% said they are “completely satisfied” with their tool stack, while 24% flagged “poor integration between tools” as a major challenge.
In practice, this means many teams remain trapped in a cycle of high-volume alerts, fragmented tooling, and manual triage. These conditions heighten operational risk, slow down incident response, and erode business confidence.
These days, most businesses rely on real-time responsiveness to stay on top of the growing number of alerts and deliver efficient infrastructure and security management.
Continuous change in infrastructure footprints – such as new services being spun up, cloud resources scaling on demand, or workloads shifting across regions – means yesterday’s baselines are quickly outdated. It's getting increasingly challenging for IT teams to stay on top of identifying, prioritizing, and addressing alerts as the footprint grows. When monitoring and alerting processes fall short – whether through unprioritized alerts, siloed dashboards, or lagging responsiveness - teams struggle to distinguish signal from noise. The result is missed warning signs, longer outages, degraded performance, and rising operational costs.
Difficulties coordinating event and incident management
Interconnected infrastructure and rising event volumes, coupled with business expectations to maintain always-on service availability, place immense pressure on IT Ops teams. Detecting early warning signs, correlating signals, and coordinating responses across hybrid environments is difficult, if not impossible, without effective orchestration. When event and incident processes rely on manual steps or fragmented tools, teams experience slower response times, missed red flags, prolonged outages, reduced productivity, and a loss of business confidence.
Pressure arising from competing demands and compliance needs
Whilst business leaders and stakeholders across departments expect always-on services, regulatory bodies and auditors (for certifications such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, or PCI DSS) demand verifiable evidence of continuity, risk management, and compliance. For practitioners, this often means balancing the competing demands of urgent uptime targets with painstaking audit and compliance-focused requirements. When reporting and data management are manual and fragmented, teams usually end up scrambling to gather disorganized logs and approvals, wasting valuable time and effort, and leaving gaps that can erode trust, trigger findings, or expose the business to penalties.
The opportunity
In today’s continuously shifting technology landscape, standing still is the fastest way to fall behind. For many IT Ops teams, the reality remains a continuous, exhausting cycle of firefighting and reactive maintenance. To maintain efficiency while supporting rapid business growth, infrastructure management must evolve.
The path forward is a foundational shift in approach; one that places orchestration and automation at the core of infrastructure management. This isn’t just about theory – it’s about achieving measurable outcomes that directly improve service quality, productivity and operational efficiency.
Four key outcomes of infrastructure orchestration and automation
Reduced latency: Automating provisioning, patching, and failover so resources are available faster, outages are resolved sooner, and teams spend less time waiting.
Improved consistency and minimized error rates: Replacing manual steps and ad-hoc scripts with orchestrated workflows that enforce consistency, reduce mistakes, and improve reliability across environments.
Elimination of end-user friction: Inefficient IT Ops often becomes a bottleneck for a business. Streamlining requests and responses is essential to ensure users experience a smoother service with fewer slowdowns, and the business experiences minimal disruption
Building resilience and governance: True operational maturity requires processes that are not only efficient but also verifiable and scalable. Orchestration and automation help embed compliance and auditability into daily operations, ensuring processes are repeatable, scalable, and verifiable as the business grows.
The impact
The demands on IT Operations have never been higher, yet many teams are still fighting the same battles with manual processes and siloed tools. Gartner previously predicted that by 2025, 70% of organisations would implement some form of automation for infrastructure delivery—an increase from 20% in 2021. Clearly, most organizations recognize the value that automation can bring. However, the most successful IT Ops teams aren't just automating; they're strategically partnering with the right automation partners to adopt more modern platforms and fundamentally change how infrastructure is managed.
Improve operational continuity and efficiency
Eliminate bottlenecks: Automate high-volume, high-risk tasks like provisioning, patching, and failover. This drastically cuts time-to-delivery and helps to avoid downtime by minimizing human error – the leading cause of unplanned outages.
Proactive resilience: Establish triggers to automatically address emerging capacity or performance issues before they affect end users. Here we can witness a key shift from fixing problems to actively preventing them.
Reduce manual overhead: By eliminating unnecessary and burdensome manual tasks, you free practitioners to focus on higher-value initiatives that better leverage their skills, such as architectural hardening and innovation.
Enhance end-user experience with added strategic value
Predictable support: Deliver faster, more predictable infrastructure support, whether the workload sits on-premise, in a hybrid setup, or across a multi-cloud environment. Consistency and predictability help to develop trust.
Guaranteed quality: Standardized, automated workflows ensure every employee receives the same high quality of service, regardless of their system, location, or request/issue type.
Proactive response: Increase your team’s responsiveness and agility without sacrificing governance. This positions IT Ops as a proactive enabling partner, rather than a source of constraint or frustration.
Bolster security and reduce operational risk
Consistency in vulnerability management: Enforce configuration and patching policies consistently via automated workflows aligned to your organizational risk tolerance. This enables you to swiftly close gaps left by exposed vulnerabilities.
Auditable workflows: Every manual step and ad hoc fix introduces a level of risk. Replace risky ad hoc fixes with orchestrated, auditable workflows. Every action can be logged and made verifiable, which helps to minimize human error and speeds up incident or compliance reviews.
Enhanced visibility: Do away with inefficient siloed tools and processes and integrate monitoring, alerting, and incident data seamlessly into an automation layer. This gives you better visibility through a single, unified view, enabling faster root-cause analysis and incident response.
Effortless verifiable compliance: Support compliance and regulatory needs effortlessly with built-in documentation and automated reporting, strengthening the organization’s overall resilience and security posture.
Achieve scalable support and simplicity
Growth without relying solely on headcount: Scaling infrastructure aligned with rapid growth shouldn’t mean automatically increasing headcount to meet demand. Automation can make a team’s capacity virtually elastic. Manage a rapidly expanding number of workloads, requests and environments without unnecessary proportional increases in staffing.
Repeatable workflows: Manual custom scripts and tribal knowledge are more challenging to maintain as a business scales. Replace custom scripts and workarounds with reusable, adaptable workflows. These can become standardized blueprints that simplify maintenance as an organization evolves.
Reduce duplication of effort: Use automation and orchestration to streamline and consolidate processes. It eliminates unnecessary duplication of effort, reduces the strain on your IT Ops teams, and ultimately makes operations simpler to maintain.
Empower IT Ops practitioners: Most importantly, modern environments that utilise automation and orchestration enable IT Ops practitioners to build and iterate directly, without depending on separate development or engineering teams. This acceleration is key to speed and ownership.
Ultimately, embracing orchestration enables IT Ops teams to move past the urgent and focus on the important, continuing to deliver speed, resilience, and strategic value as a business evolves.
What good looks like: some real-world examples
Tines is already helping global customers unlock this kind of value from IT operations. They include:
Sophos
Sophos is using Tines to keep its employees and data around the world safe
"We also have workflows that correlate data from different services to alert us when a user is added to a privileged group…or when a new host is discovered on the perimeter of the network."
Turo
Toro built a workflow that connects with their vulnerability management solution to help them stay on top of AWS events, consolidate patch management efforts and consume information easily for respective stakeholders.
“With Tines, we have real-time visibility across our endpoints and our environment.”
Ready to automate infrastructure management?
If you're looking to explore intelligent workflows for infrastructure management, these questions will help you get off to a strong start.
Operational efficiency
Are routine tasks like provisioning, patching, configuration updates, or failovers still performed manually or through brittle scripts?
Do these tasks slow your team down or create unnecessary operational risk?
Is your team spending most of its time firefighting rather than improving core infrastructure?
Tooling and integration
Do you rely on multiple disparate dashboards, consoles, and monitoring tools to understand system health?
Is it difficult to correlate alerts or events across hybrid and multi-cloud environments?
Are poor tool integrations creating blind spots or inconsistent processes?
Impact and measurement
Are capacity or performance issues difficult to anticipate or detect early?
Is alert fatigue slowing down triage and inflating response times?
Do gaps in documentation or evidence make incident reviews or compliance cycles more painful than they should be?
Business impact and end-user support
Are your team able to respond to infrastructure issues as quickly as needed? Do delays in response lead to more downtime, degraded pzerformance, or friction for internal teams?
Are business stakeholders pushing for faster delivery, greater predictability, or more resilient service?
Do you need a more scalable, reliable foundation that supports growth without constant headcount increases?
Pre-built workflows for infrastructure management
Identify and remediate high AWS EC2 Disk Usage with Elastic Observability and document with Tines cases
Tools: AWS, Elastic, Tines
Deallocate and delete unnecessary virtual machines in Azure and raise tickets
Tools: Jira Software, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure
Manage temporary EC2 instances for development and testing and send notifications in Slack
Tools: AWS, Slack
Investigate AWS issues with CLI data using agents
Tools: AWS, Tines
Transforming infrastructure management: the Tines advantage
Tines is already helping organizations reduce end-user friction, improve the ROI of their tech stacks, and relieve pressure on stretched IT teams. Here’s how:
No code, no complexity
Tines helps IT teams orchestrate infrastructure management with flexibility, security, and speed, without the need to get hands-on with code (unless, of course, your team members would prefer to code)
End-to-end coordination
Tines connects workflows across monitoring tools, infrastructure platforms, and operational systems, helping teams manage the full lifecycle of infrastructure tasks with clarity and control. Every step is traceable, auditable, and customizable.
Seamless integration across the stack
Tines is vendor-agnostic, meaning it works with the infrastructure tools you already rely on – like AWS, Azure, GCP, and on prem systems. If it offers an API, Tines connects with it. This lets you build unified workflows that reduce context switching and create a single, consistent way to manage your estate.
Secure, streamlined approvals
Flexible workflows adapt to your policies and approval chains, enabling fast, secure access management and task escalation without manual bottlenecks.
Real-time visibility
With built-in dashboards, notifications, and Pages - which allow you to introduce interactions from anyone at any point in your workflow - teams get real-time insights into workflow status, exceptions, and outcomes. No more guessing what's happening behind the scenes.
Built for collaboration
Tines is designed for secure teamwork. Teams can build, test, and iterate safely together – all while controlling access to sensitive data and actions.
Enterprise-grade flexibility
Tines supports hybrid cloud, self-hosted, and on-prem environments, meeting your team where it operates – with the compliance, auditability, and scalability you need.
Empower every team member
With a short learning curve and a no-code interface, Tines empowers IT staff and non-technical team members to build, adapt, and maintain workflows without waiting on engineering or writing scripts.
Getting started with Tines
Infrastructure management isn’t just about uptime. It underpins performance, security, and business continuity, making it a strategic enabler of growth. Yet complex estates, fragmented tooling, and manual processes often stand in the way, adding unnecessary friction and slowing teams down.
The good news is that operational excellence is much closer than it appears. And you don’t need a disruptive overhaul of your stack to get there. Whether you’re maintaining configurations, managing capacity, addressing vulnerabilities, or coordinating events and incidents across hybrid environments, intelligent workflows help teams deliver more value with clarity and confidence.
Check out related resources: Unlocking IT agility with automation | Vol 1: Patch management and The hidden cost of manual capacity management.