EMA White Paper | Taking a Strategic Approach to Network Operations To adopt this needed automation-centric approach, IT should create a top-down plan for ˆay ‹, ˆay Œ and ˆay Ž network operations that builds easily accessible automation into its very core IT leaders should push for a platform approach in which everyone involved in network operations has a common view of the network and one consistent mechanism for automating any problem that occurs This automation should be available to anyone at any time, for any size of problem, and without engaging software developers or reuiring complex coding †utomation-centric network operations is scalable It starts with typical ˆay ‹ and ˆay Œ operations, such as auto-discovery, configuration management, and change controls ¦owever, when it also includes capabilities for ˆay Ž operations, it becomes strategic Three main categories of automation form the basis for next-generation network operations¤ • †utomation that responds to problems at the moment an event occurs This automation would triage problems and perform diagnostics before human operators become involved, while assessing the issue for business impact More importantly, it should also verify against all previous problems that have occurred on the network - and make sure that it hasn’t happened again This dramatically reduces the MTT¢ and the duration of tickets to which human operators must respond • Mechanisms that capture the interactive resolution of any problem and make it available to the entire organization for subseuent problem solving The same platform would provide a more intelligent envi- ronment for network problem solving, reducing the time it takes to resolve problems in the first place • †utomation that validates, verifies, and enforces various infrastructure conditions that must exist for the organization’s business applications to perform as designed This can range from simple available bandwidth validation to protocol filtering for security reasons NetBrain: A Network Automation Platform etrain offers a comprehensive network automation platform built for hybrid networks, including the public cloud ow in its fourth generation, it discovers an end-to-end network and provides real-time visibility and dynamic maps of every device and traffic flow in any size of infrastructure etrain’s visual management console is available to all network operators and engineers, along with their opera- tional counterparts across the organization 3