Top Reasons Why Network Automation is Important
As networks become increasingly complex due to rapid technological advances, lengthy downtimes can occur when network devices break down, resulting in financial impacts on company operations and additional burdens on IT staff as they attempt to mitigate the issue. To combat this growing complexity, organizations must keep up with the latest technology and invest in robust systems to ensure that networks remain reliable and resilient. Managed IT Services Vermont experts help businesses to ensure their network reliability.
Network automation can help make your IT infrastructure more efficient and resilient, enabling it to keep up with the growing complexity of today’s networks. Automated network device provisioning, configuration, and management allow time for the people overseeing network operations to become more productive and capable. This ultimately leads to a more stable, scalable, and resilient network infrastructure better equipped to handle increased complexity.
Top 6 Reasons Why Network Automation is Important
1. Human error
Network automation is essential for reducing human error and improving network reliability. It is estimated that human error accounts for up to 80% of network failures, so automated processes are vital for mitigating this risk. In addition, automated systems can help ensure that hundreds of routers and switches are updated quickly and accurately while providing mechanisms to verify proposed changes and enforce a change control process where other network engineers validate them. Finally, it helps to eliminate silly mistakes and ensure that network changes are implemented correctly.
Networks are becoming increasingly complex, and managing them to ensure high availability is daunting. Automation is the only way to manage the size and complexity of these networks while ensuring consistent performance and reliability. By leveraging automation, businesses can improve their network performance, reduce costs, and increase the efficiency of their IT operations.
2. Increases Resilience
Optimal network performance is achieved through automated updates and changes that occur regularly and without fail, ensuring that processes that could be overlooked due to their complexity no longer need to be manually managed.
Network automation also enables more straightforward management tasks, with powerful tools that monitor network performance and alert your staff to potential errors before they occur, helping them to prevent downtime and achieve service level agreements with minimal effort.
3. Enhance Network Scalability
To ensure optimal efficiency and keep up with the changing needs of your business, it’s essential that your network infrastructure is configured correctly and able to handle the current and future demands of your organization. However, this can be a difficult task due to the complexities of the system. Fortunately, with the right tools and strategies, you can make sure that your network is well-equipped to meet your business’s unique demands and keep pace with the ever-evolving environment.
Scalable network automation ensures that your networks remain dynamic, agile, and capable of scaling as your company grows. Automation allows faster and more efficient network operations while reducing costs and improving network security. With network automation, your business will be better equipped to handle rapid growth and changing demands while maintaining the agility and scalability necessary to succeed.
Network automation can help you scale quickly and efficiently when running the exact configuration change across hundreds of networks or tracking a particular client across thousands of devices. In addition, automation eliminates tedious manual work, ensuring your processes are carried out quickly and accurately.
4. Simplify Network Management
Network automation makes it possible to quickly and easily perform many network management processes that are often too time-consuming and resource-draining to be done manually.
Automation also ensures consistent application of network configurations across the entire infrastructure, making network management simpler, faster, and easier to scale. As a result, network failure and downtime can be reduced and managed more effectively, ensuring optimal performance and reliability.
5. Improved Efficiency and Performance
Failing to automate your network can have severe consequences – not only will it require more manual effort to manage, maintain, monitor, and troubleshoot the system, but it can also lead to a decrease in the reliability and performance of the system due to the lack of automation.
Automation reduces manual and time-consuming tasks which a Network Engineer has to run repeatedly. As such, your company will experience simple processes, improved efficiency, and faster operations.
By leveraging the latest technologies and automation tools, you can increase business cost-efficiency while empowering your IT teams and freeing their time to focus on more value-added processes. It helps reduce costs while keeping your teams motivated and productive.
6. Network Analysis
Network analysis is the process of taking all the collected data about a network and performing a deep analysis to identify potential issues and opportunities to increase efficiency. This analysis can be simple, such as identifying interfaces running at high utilization or more complex, with data from multiple devices. For instance, a VRRP group may only contain one router, while a duplex mismatch may be identified by examining an interface’s configuration, state, and operational data. With multiple data sources, network analysis can help identify problems before they become serious.
Network analysis can be improved by incorporating data sources such as events (Syslog or SNMP traps). Unfortunately, most network management systems collect the data but rarely provide the necessary analysis. Automating the analysis tasks can help network engineers quickly identify and address problems they often need more time to address. In addition, this automation can save time and effort, enabling the engineer to focus on more critical tasks.
Conclusion
Network automation has become an essential aspect of modern network management. By automating repetitive tasks and providing real-time monitoring and analysis, network automation allows IT professionals to focus on more strategic tasks, enabling organizations to achieve their business goals faster. Furthermore, it enables better decision-making by providing detailed insights into network performance and usage. As the demand for high-performance networks and more complex infrastructure continues to grow, network automation will become even more critical for organizations looking to stay ahead of the competition.
Post courtesy: Steve Loyer, President, and CEO at Tech Group, LLC
