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Back to AllHow To Drive Consistency with Continuous Configuration Automation (CCA)
Outcomes
Our two Continuous Configuration Automation (CCA) Case Studies demonstrate that CCA efforts deliver outcomes that matter to application owners:
- 100% Configuration Settings and Compliance Standards Monitored
- Zero Unplanned Downtime Once CCA Adopted
- 90% Labor Reduction to Achieve Stable App Configurations
- Changes Between Releases Driven Down to 1.1% of System Configurations
Continuous Configuration Automation Drives System Consistency
In today’s dynamic IT environments, managing system configurations and ensuring compliance across complex infrastructures is both critical and increasingly challenging. CCA empowers organizations to define baseline configurations, deploy them consistently, and proactively monitor for drift—delivering operational stability, security, and long-term efficiency.
Why Invest in Continuous Configuration Automation?
While implementing automation requires upfront investment in tools and expertise, the long-term benefits are transformative. According to the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ I&O Automation, 2025:
“by enabling automated deployment and configuration of systems, settings and software programmatically, organizations realize:
Productivity gains: Repeatable, declarative, version-controlled infrastructure deployment and operation
Cost optimization: Reductions in manual interventions by skilled staff
Risk mitigation: Security and compliance assessment and remediation automation using standardized policies that are used to audit configurations to minimize drift”
Ultimately, Continuous Configuration Automation (CCA) minimizes misconfiguration, frees up experts to focus on strategic efforts, and reduces compliance risk.
Key Pillars of an Effective CCA Strategy
Successful CCA adoption requires embedding automation into IT and DevOps culture. Start by integrating experienced infrastructure automation professionals into your team, and implement in phases:
- Controlled & Auditable Deployments: Repeatable, traceable automation reduces human error and accelerates troubleshooting during deployment and operations.
- Continuous Compliance Testing: Automated inspections ensure systems remain aligned with defined baselines and industry standards, such as STIGs or CIS benchmarks.
- Uniform Configuration Enforcement: From OS-level settings to application-specific configurations and certificates, enforced baselines prevent unauthorized or unintentional drift.
- Insightful Metrics Tracking: Visibility into drift events through automated tracking and reporting enables continuous improvement and early issue detection.
How to Implement Continuous Configuration Automation
Successful CCA adoption requires embedding automation into IT and DevOps culture. Start by integrating experienced infrastructure automation professionals into your team, and implement in phases:
- Automate Infrastructure Build-Out: Use Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) to provision consistent environments
- Automate Installation & Configuration: Use scripts and tools to handle software installs and changes consistently
- Define Baseline Settings: Clearly document expected configurations for OS, COTS software, certificates, and policy requirements
- Deploy and Monitor: Roll out the baselines and continuously check compliance using automated reporting and alerting
Real-World Case Study: Reduce Drift, Save Time, and Expand Capability
Two real-world case studies demonstrate how CCA reduces drift and strengthens stability, not just by enforcing consistency, but by freeing up experts to focus on solving complex problems and managing meaningful change.
Before CCA, both customer environments lacked visibility into configuration drift and relied on slow, manual remediation processes. Once implemented, CCA provided automated detection, faster response, and consistent enforcement, resulting in measurable gains in system stability, operational speed, and engineering capacity.
Case Study 1:
In one environment managing 1,170 unique configurations, within 2 quarters unexpected configuration changes were reduced from 110 to 53, then further down to 33 across three successive releases.
Within this environment, before CCA over 10% of configurations were changing between releases. After full adoption of CCA, only 2.8% of configurations were changing between releases.
This improvement fits well within InSequence’s recommended Objectives and Key Results (OKR) of 97% consistency of configuration settings between releases for a system that is released quarterly.
The fact that this OKR allows for 3% of settings to change between releases should not be cause for alarm. This 3% OKR allows for hotfixes, patches, and normal environment changes such as certificate updates, DNS name changes, and mandated security settings.
Case Study 2:
In another environment with over 6,103 unique configurations CCA demonstrated a decrease in unexpected changes from 169 to 70, then 74, and finally 69 across four releases.
During the first release, almost 2.8% of all settings changed after the baseline was released. This was driven down to under 1.2%. In this environment, that means that during Q4, 69 of 6103 settings changed in a 3 month window.
Again, this improvement fits well within InSequence’s recommended Objectives and Key Results (OKR) of 97% consistency of configuration settings between releases for a system that is released quarterly.
Moreover, the fact that this OKR allows for 3% of settings to change between releases should not be cause for alarm. This 3% OKR allows for hotfixes, patches, and normal environment changes such as certificate updates, DNS name changes, and mandated security settings.
It is important to note that in each of these use cases, the customers did not have any method for tracking metrics for configuration changes between releases before CCA was implemented. Anecdotally, in both cases, customers stated that changes between releases were very common and the cause of frequent issues.
Time Savings and Capability Gains
Prior to automation, achieving stable configurations across the environment required an estimated 2,880 labor hours per year —a major drain on engineering time. After implementing CCA, the same work now takes just 288 hours—a 90% reduction.
The time savings didn’t just eliminate inefficiency—it enabled new capability. The organization now uses the recovered hours to improve accuracy earlier in the pipeline and invest in proactive improvements, rather than reactive fire-fighting.
As one stakeholder put it: “We’re finally able to get things right the first time because we’re not wasting cycles fixing what should have been correct to begin with.”
Results Common to Both Case Studies
- Zero unplanned downtime once CCA was fully adopted
- 100% consistent enforcement of compliance baselines and security policies
- Enhanced agility—more work done with fewer hours
- Stronger confidence in audit readiness and operational integrity with 100% of configuration changes monitored
CCA enables operations teams to work confidently knowing their environments are compliant, auditable, and resilient.
Conclusion: A Strategic Enabler for Modern IT
Continuous Configuration Automation is more than a technical implementation—it’s a strategic enabler for consistent, secure, and scalable IT operations. The ability to define, enforce, and monitor configurations in real time ensures that organizations stay ahead of operational and security risks.
CCA is not about doing less work—it’s about doing smarter work with engineered outcomes in mind.
Citations:
Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for I&O Automation, 2025, 27 June 2025
GARTNER and HYPE CYCLE are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.