Many businesses are attempting to manage various proprietary, open source, and custom network automation tools, with fully successful automation initiatives being quite rare.
Network automation tech offers operative efficiency and diminished security risks, making it seem like a clear investment choice for IT leaders. However, synchronizing data sources, choosing the correct tools, and achieving success with network automation are intimidating tasks. These require IT departments to collaborate and share data across different areas to see results.
Enterprise Management Associates, a research company, surveyed 354 IT professionals in January 2024 regarding their organization’s methods towards network automation. The data shows that only 18% of the examined IT professionals rate their network automation strategies as entirely successful. Additionally, 54% noted partial success, while 38% were either uncertain about their level of success or confessed failure with their network automation projects.
According to Shamus McGillicuddy, research director for the network management practice at EMA, network automation continues to be a significant issue that is not diminishing. He elaborates further, as per the company’s recent report Enterprise Network Automation: Emerging from the Dark Ages and Reaching Toward NetDevOps. He suggests that while there’s no single way towards network automation success, there are several strategies an organization can utilize to ensure success.
The survey findings indicate that a combination of DIY, proprietary utilities, open-source solutions, and business automation tools are being utilized by most IT departments. As per the latest EMA’s webinar, IT leaders continue to face challenges with network automation, such as finding the right expertise in their teams, establishing a unified knowledge source about their IT environments, and promoting cross-domain collaboration in their IT departments.
For the organizations that have experienced success with network automation, the advantages are apparent, particularly in today’s intricate multicloud frameworks. Two main advantages were identified by the survey participants as the positive outcomes of their network automation investments: 33.9% mentioned operational efficiency (making skilled staff more productive), and 32.8% mentioned a reduction in security risk. To put it another way, the EMA report suggests that network automation enhances team productivity and eliminates mistakes that could lead to security incidents.
Additional advantages recognized from network automation efforts include:
A network tools engineer at a Fortune 500 retailer explained in the EMA report, “Considering our scale to handle thousands of locations, tasks like executing a simple modification or command on a network device becomes a massive task. Automation greatly simplifies compliance, configuration file collection from devices, report generation, and deployment operations for our staff.”
The EMA data also contradicts the notion that network automation could in some way displace IT professionals. As per the interviews EMA conducted with 10 anonymous IT leaders, the perceived threat of automation is offset by the advantages automation provides.
“Automation eliminates human error from the network. Our outages have decreased by a significant percentage,” stated a network automation engineer at a large university in the EMA study. “Our automation tools perform numerous checks before implementing any change. This has given technicians who lack the skills to make alterations and write configurations more authority. Field teams can now include individuals with lesser skill sets, who can just press a button to troubleshoot issues.”
Yet even with the positive aspects noted by 18% of the respondents, several business and technical obstacles still exist. According to the EMA study, more than 31% of IT leaders mentioned IT leadership issues (buy-in, direction, commitment). Over one-quarter (26.8%) of the respondents identified staffing issues like skills gaps and staff churn as a business challenge.
“My biggest challenge is the scarcity of network engineers who can contribute to automation,” said a network engineer at a midmarket business services company in the EMA study. “The community is tight-knit, and it’s difficult to find individuals who can assist you in resolving an issue.”
Another 25% highlighted budget constraints as a major hurdle, and almost one-fourth reported intergroup conflicts/collaboration challenges (for instance, between NetOps, DevOps, SecOps) as a problem. A similar percentage of interviewees also identified security policy restrictions as an obstacle. Other barriers include the challenge of prioritizing specific use cases for automation (18.6%), the unclear return on investment (16.9%), difficulties in securing stakeholder engagement, engineers resisting the adoption of automation (16.4%), and limitations in customer support (16.4%).
Beyond business impediments to a successful automation approach, there are also several technical issues that need to be resolved. The most prominent challenge is the difficulty of integrating automation with other systems, with over 25% of respondents identifying integration as a technical difficulty. Almost 24.9% of the respondents cited network complexity/standards absence as one of the most challenging technical aspects related to network automation.
The engineer report of a network tools at a Fortune 500 retail company indicated other technical issues raised by EMA’s survey participants were:
“The biggest hurdle is standardization,” the report quoted the engineer. “When the network and the data aren’t standardized, and there’s no standard method for generating inventories and a truth source, it poses a significant problem. The lack of standardization forces you to automate one device at a time, which doesn’t allow you to automate at scale.”
