The infrastructure landscape is at a crossroads. As AI agents and automation reshape business operations, traditional infrastructure — often rigid, slow, and siloed — can no longer keep pace with the demands of modern enterprises. Today, Forrester introduces the OASIS Framework for outcome-driven infrastructure platforms, a new vision for how technology leaders should build infrastructure for the agentic AI era.
Why OASIS, And Why Now?
Agentic AI is rapidly becoming a catalyst for reimagining enterprise infrastructure environments. Intelligent, automated agents require dynamic, responsive environments — something that legacy systems, built for static workloads and manual governance, simply cannot provide. Businesses also need to control risks that AI agents, AI-enabled security threats, and unauthorized AI use bring into the business. Platform engineering practices must migrate to enterprisewide infrastructure platforms to embed operational-, security-, and compliance-related functionality into the platform itself so that tech leaders can unlock stalled AI projects by reducing the risk of innovation.
Introducing The OASIS Framework
The OASIS Framework defines five foundational capability areas that leaders must embed in their infrastructure platforms.
Observable (O): Ensures that platforms generate rich telemetry about the internal state and events, supporting compliance, FinOps, and RiskOps.
Accountable (A): Verifies every action and change against policy and records immutably, enabling traceability and alignment with business objectives.
Securable (S): Embeds Zero Trust principles, fine-grained access controls, and cryptoagility, ensuring data integrity and safe AI operations.
Intelligible (I): Makes platform operations understandable to both humans and AI, supporting explainability and smarter automation.
Service-driven (S): Exposes platform functions as services, enabling automation, scalability, and composability across the enterprise.
These capabilities are not just features — they are interlocking pillars that create a trusted foundation for automation, governance, and innovation.
What Does This Mean For Technology Leaders?
The OASIS Framework empowers technology leaders to:
Align infrastructure with business goals. Move from rigid, legacy systems to dynamic platforms that support continuous innovation.
Enable autonomous operations. Combine observability, accountability, security, intelligibility, and service-driven design to create self-managing, self-healing, and self-optimizing systems.
Accelerate audits and compliance. Embed verifiable telemetry and immutable records for real-time compliance and smarter, faster audits.
Drive adaptability and resilience. Modular, composable infrastructure supports rapid scaling and adaptation to unpredictable demands — critical for AI model training, workload variation, and resilience engineering.
Mitigate risk in transformation. OASIS provides a roadmap for iterative modernization, balancing innovation with operational stability, especially in complex brownfield environments.
The Bottom Line
Forrester’s OASIS Framework is here to help enterprises leverage AI now and new technologies in the future. By embedding these five capability areas, technology leaders can ensure their platforms are not only AI-ready but also secure, resilient, and aligned with business outcomes. Check out the full-length report here on the OASIS Framework and each of its capabilities, and reach out for a guidance session to learn how you can apply this framework in your business.
