The Essential Factors In Avoiding Failures In Network Automation

While modern networks are excessively complex, and these must stay manual, network automation continues to be a difficult job for businesses to accomplish. Making the network largely automatic, has many advantages as the proliferation of devices and an increase in the amount of data begin to outpace IT capabilities. The research company, Gartner has discovered that businesses automating 70% of the network change of them, reduces outages by half, and delivers services 50% quicker.

Today’s automation tools are products used to handle policy and network orchestration. Automation should be part of the whole network so that it can be effective and can streamline management. Businesses have to pay attention to the following areas to not have to encounter costly failures in automation.

Visibility

IT should form end to end network visibility into every existing network device to have secure and effective automation. The automatic finding of routers, switches, access points, appliances, and controllers is part of this. It takes updating smaller network infrastructural segments individually, to accomplish this degree of visibility. IT has to work in phases to update various segments in this journey of transformation. Being wary of variations that exist in both software and hardware generation processes matters in order to transition one segment properly before proceeding to the other one, and accomplish end-to-end network visibility.

The Intent

This should be applied to your infrastructure to hide the complexity of it at the same time as making the advantages of agility, improved management, and security, plus simplicity. This also lowers the network load, thereby making network performance better and keeping certain problems from happening. Having to frequently come up with manual changes, tend to cause configuration inconsistencies and mistakes. By determining the way in which the network has to function, automation can keep monitoring and translating network intent to encourage operations to bring the desired result.

Here is how: begin by finding out the way it should work and whether the infrastructure can do intent on the basis of the present software version and devices. After that, examine different procedures which when automated, will aid in making the network more agile. Start small and simple with processes that you can comfortably give the control of performing the automation to an automation controller. You must confirm that automation controllers are doing the function of these correctly and that the desired outputs have been achieved, before proceeding to the subsequent process.

Deployment

To confirm that the business network and the automation of it are going correctly, IT has to utilize the ideal software for the controllers and network. Updating the controller’s software will ensure that there is access to present capabilities and the best possible performance. The intent or software updates should include running pretests and posttests, to check how these affect the network.

The aforementioned step will aid in mitigating the possibility of an update causing failure in some place of your network. For your information, this failure possibly drives outages or leaves the network vulnerable. This is another situation where updates have to be rolled out in smaller parts individually to confirm that everything works correctly.

After creating and automating network intent through the controllers, there is a need for managing the process of deploying fresh or updated software and hardware without direct human intervention. This will make discovering one of the following possible.

• Existing devices that go through updates to have the correct configuration for proper security, user experience, and capabilities.
• New devices that are made part of the network.

The discovery will not only stop errors but also shrink the required number of IT resources.

Change Management

It is vital to spend money on the proper tools and training to know the way to make automation conform to a standard, to aid teams in transitioning to automation. This will also help them know that automation exists to aid them in making the network function better for better business performance.

The inclusion of new patches, devices, security, and software updates, plus other tasks keeps changing the network. Automation possibly helps to minimize the number and expenses of IT tasks and to confirm that the network is being deployed and configured quickly and accurately. Minimizing the tasks mentioned above through automation gives IT a bigger bandwidth to handle fresh projects for the following.

• Making both business agility and results better; and,
• Allowing IT to have a bigger impact on business transformation than usual.

This will turn IT into a strategic function.

Extensibility

Combining automation with many other IT components, will further improve the user’s experience, minimize management loads on IT, plus cause the business transformation to happen quickly. For instance, integrating with IT service management systems and making certain ITSM capabilities largely automatic, will aid in pinpointing and resolving issues fast, thereby reducing business impact greatly. When expanding automation to IT’s other areas, be sure to transition the areas which can aid in improving the level of business output, plus helping it grow.

Tackling the aforementioned areas when implementing network-wide automation will allow businesses to address the network automation requirements. Addressing these will minimize not just network expenses but also the management-related tasks that IT teams handle when managing an ever-evolving network.

It is vital to check and update the already automated areas so that these grow as the network evolves and correctly perform the intended function. Automation is a constant journey, but paying attention to the areas will help the entity make their agility and digital output better.