EMA White Paper | Taking a Strategic Approach to Network Operations Tactical Network Operations are Pervasive Executive or decades, most IT organizations followed a manual approach to network operations that is siloed by the Summary network technology involved, dependent on the specific operator or engineer’s own personal knowledge and experience, and reliant upon a mix of commercial and homegrown tools ‚ince these approaches are highly Many of today’s IT organizations labor-intensive, they don’t scale very well and they don’t provide a level of consistency to problem resolution are still taking a labor-inten- ƒven worse, operational inefficiency consumes an increasing amount of precious IT resources sive, manually executed, tactical …iven this ineffective approach to network operations, IT organizations may try to adopt a similarly limited approach to network operations, scope and siloed approach to network automation or instance, the wide-area team might attempt to even as their infrastructures automate † elements with software-defined † solutions, campus switching and i-i elements have grown dramatically in with software-defined ‡† solutions, and data center fabric elements with specialized fabric automation scope, scale, and complexity Moreover, they may try to use ˆevps tools to automate networking in the public cloud This complex, over time They may be hindered multi-part automation will lack end-to-end controls and contextual workflows that prevent effective and by a lack of end-to-end visibility scalable automation of hybrid networks across their platform domains or the perception that newer and Šompounding the problem, most enterprises focus on ˆay ‹ and ˆay Œ network operations, such as more scalable approaches, such as zero-touch provisioning and change and configuration management They neglect the much larger and automation, may not be applicable longer-term opportunity to automate ˆay Ž network operations in a defendable fashion The tools they tra- to etps due to the uniueness of ditionally use to monitor performance, manage tickets, and troubleshoot the network often lack any type network problem-solving technolo- of repeatability gies In some cases, they simply lack Instead, many network engineers maintain a personal library of one-off scripts to automate network a broader vision about how to scale engineering tasks, but these scripts fall out of use if that engineer leaves the organization or if the infra- operations because they don’t have structure changes whatsoever This happens uite often given that it is estimated that enterprise-class the experience needed to think dif- network device firmware is upgraded ‘on average’ Ž-“ times per year ferently about the challenge ‚ome organizations have tried to write internal software to automate workflows, but they are increas- This paper explores why network ingly searching for off-the-shelf commercial software and integrated automation solutions ˆifferent managers should think more strate- types of automation tools coexist inside a network management toolset, creating inefficiency as various gically about network operations and problems are solved in a myriad of ways, depending on who is involved IT continues to be left with a the value of implementing network fractured network management toolset that cannot coordinate end-to-end operations across the data automation in their operations e’ll center, †, ‡†, and cloud †ccording to ƒM† research, ŽŒ” of network teams believe that their also highlight how Massachusetts- based etrain Technologies, Inc Œ fragmented management tools are a ma•or impediment to successful network operations offers a platform for a strategic approach to network operations through automation Œ ƒM†, “etwork Management Megatrends Ž‹Ž‹,” †pril Ž‹Ž‹ 1
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