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 ˆevps 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 etps due to the uniueness 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 etrain 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