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Shannon Williams. News Editor, IT Brief United Kingdom
New research into how large organisations run Microsoft automation in production finds many IT teams struggle with governance, integration and visibility as their automation estates grow.
A survey of 180 IT managers and senior system engineers at organisations with more than 1,000 employees found that 72% cannot enforce full governance policies across automation, covering identity, approvals and audit. It also found that 83% have automation spread across three or more disconnected tools, limiting end-to-end orchestration.
The study focused on Microsoft-centric environments, including Microsoft 365 and Azure. It examined operational failure points in live production, such as unclear ownership of scripts and workflows, inconsistent identity and service-account use, weak audit trails, and limited integration with IT service management and monitoring tools.
Production reality
Microsoft automation is now routine in IT operations through tools such as Power Automate, Azure Automation, Logic Apps and PowerShell. Task-level automation is common, but many teams still rely on scripts that are hard to run reliably across teams and shifts.
Many respondents reported gaps in basic run-time accountability. Teams often cannot quickly confirm what ran, who triggered it, which identity was used, or whether approved standards were followed. During incidents, these gaps can drive manual intervention and create dependence on a few individuals who understand how workflows behave in production.
Fragmentation also shows up in integration. Only 17% reported full integration across ITSM, monitoring and infrastructure tooling; most cited partial integration or siloed operation. Without clean links between operational systems, teams often end up with isolated scripts rather than orchestrated workflows spanning monitoring alerts, ticketing and infrastructure changes.