Network Automation

Why Your Company Needs to Automate Network Processes

Today’s companies are looking to accelerate their IT operations. At the same time, their IT teams want to simplify and automate processes to use their limited resources more efficiently and support business goals. 

The growing complexity of the enterprise network makes it harder for companies to be efficient. Workloads and IT resources, such as endpoints, are distributed, leading to poor network visibility. 

Many companies aren’t automating their network. Organizations may have pockets of automation in certain IT processes, but they need to bring it to the network.  

Traditionally, network management has been handled manually, which is time consuming and error prone. That’s why companies should consider automation opportunities for the network. Network automation can eliminate downtime, optimize security, accommodate changes, and increase operational efficiency. 

Network automation doesn’t need to be an all-or-none strategy. Many organizations choose to invest in low-hanging fruit first or areas that address immediate needs, such as onboarding devices or automating provisioning, configuration, and image management when physical access to remote sites is not an option.

Eliminating Manual Tasks

With network automation, your company replaces manual tasks with predictable, repeatable network functions. Automating manual processes increases productivity, allowing your IT team to focus on strategic initiatives and innovation. 

Automation accelerates delivery of services, such as data services, by optimizing network performance. An automated network helps your company to accelerate new services and applications to the market. 

With network automation, processes can be standardized using templates, driving efficiency among network stakeholders, streamlining network changes, and eliminating procedural errors that come with manual processes, such as typing wrong IP addresses or routes and provisioning a network or service incorrectly. 

Resiliency and Availability

Automation can be used to build a more reliable, available, and resilient network. An infrastructure-as-code approach helps to maintain the state and configuration of your network, from the data center to edge, similarly to the way developers manage source code. 

Performance monitoring capabilities detect performance issues, spikes in resource utilization, and errors on the network. Relying on network analytics for insight into performance, utilization, security, and resource allocation helps resolve issues faster than is possible using manual processes.  

Network automation reduces unplanned downtime by automating recovery tasks, eliminating the need for manual intervention for network recovery. 

Security Automation

Automation can be used to set and carry out network security policies consistently across the network. With automation, your business gains visibility into the overall attack surface.  

Automation makes it possible to detect threats, analyze risk, and resolve network issues.  

Security automation addresses the lack of skilled security staff required to operate and maintain the security operations center (SOC). Many aspects of the security response lifecycle can be automated, including detection and analysis, containment, eradication, and recovery. 

Accommodating Changes

In the past, your organization may have executed network changes only rarely because they were manual, time consuming, and resource intensive. Network automation empowers your company to execute network changes more quickly and frequently. 

Small companies may not have many changes. Larger organizations have more applications to run and more changes happening. However, automation can help smaller organizations identify more opportunities for change and growth. 

How to Automate Your Network

Software-defined network (SDN) creates automation opportunities by moving the network function to the software layer, decoupling them from their dependence on hardware.  

Cisco, VMware, Dell, and many other network leaders are putting a major focus on the network automation space, providing network virtualization with automated provisioning, security segmentation, and multi-cloud capabilities. 

EchoStor has a key solution focus on networking and security that includes automation, SDN, and AI. Our Network Architects can help your company design a next-generation network that takes advantage of automation opportunities.