Understanding the Benefits of Network Automation and How They Impact Your Network Team

As networks continue to evolve and grow in complexity, the need for network automation is becoming more and more crucial. Luckily, the benefits of network automation are numerous and the impact on your organization is significant.

The complexity, scale, and rapid evolution of modern networks have created a demanding environment in which administrators are expected to provide a highly available network that sustains core business operations.

In today’s ever-changing network environments, network automation is becoming less of a suggestion and more of a requirement. This is because, without it, your team will continue reactively managing outages, performance degradations, and security vulnerabilities. And in a fast-paced, competitive world, this operational drag acts as an impediment that puts your business at a disadvantage.

It’s time to take a deep dive into the benefits of network automation to fully understand the impact it has on network teams and why it has become more of a requirement than a suggestion.

Benefits of Network Automation

Network automation has many benefits for enterprises of all sizes. Let’s dig into some of the top benefits and how they may impact your organization.

1. Lower Operating Costs

By simplifying operations and programmatically executing tasks, engineers can focus on project work and strategic business priorities, fully leveraging their creativity and ingenuity to do what they do best: imagine and revolutionize the way things are done with game-changing ideas.

2. Enhanced Stability

Automated networks are more reliable. The leading cause of network outages is human error. Whether that’s due to a misconfigured technology or an improperly applied maintenance window, these problems are completely avoidable with programmatic execution. NetDevOps solutions not only execute predictably and layer fail-safes throughout, but they also catch the mistakes humans make.

3. Business Agility

The ability to deploy services and operationalize plans quickly is not only a key benefit of network automation, but it is also key to maintaining a competitive edge. NetDevOps solutions condense the timelines and reduce the capital requirements of new projects, extending their functional life. Automation can speed up the implementation of the service, which allows the benefits of the service to be realized much sooner—potentially weeks or months in advance.

4. Hardened Security

With cyberattacks expected to rise sharply in coming years, it’s absolutely critical that organizations harden their security posture. Luckily, the benefits of network automation reduce the likelihood of security attacks. Automation assists organizations throughout the world to maintain security best practices. Leveraging automated solutions means that your infrastructure is always running the recommended software version and your configurations are maintained and monitored to ensure they conform to a standard. Network automation also provides a framework that enables organizations to isolate security threats more quickly by programmatically retrieving information for administrators.

5. Greater Insight and Control

Understanding the current state of the network is crucial for effective management. Administrators of NetDevOps-inspired networks enjoy a nuanced, dynamic and detailed view of the network, augmented by Source of Truth data. By enriching the collection process with the latest technologies, they enjoy access to a larger data lake. Rich dashboards are intelligently designed to present the information you need, where you need it; enabling organizations to make business decisions informed by empirical data.

A New Era in Network Automation

Now that we’ve explored the benefits of network automation, it’s important to realize that it takes the right people, technology, and processes to create a great network automation program.

Many teams don’t realize the type of heavy lifting that’s required to establish automation for your networks. It’s difficult for companies to figure out which tools they need because of the lack of architectural and solution experts in this field.

Network to Code recognized that many network teams saw the benefits of network automation but were facing obstacles and various challenges when it came to choosing the right network automation solution for their team.

NTC’s Fast Track Solutions are solutions that are tried-and-true, have been deployed numerous times into production environments, and are rooted in a NetDevOps and data-driven approach to network automation. Fast Track Solutions represent the most common use cases and challenges network organizations are facing today.

Don’t let the challenges that come with choosing the right network automation solution prevent you from reaping the benefits of network automation.