Today’s digital business expects that enterprise networking keeps up with the pace of change. With this notion, the idea of automation is no longer a question but a necessity. The real question isn’t should you automate, but how do you get started in the first place?
At Itential, we’ve spent years working with customers who have that very same question. We’ve developed a step-by-step guide on how to take a practical approach to achieve immediate success in your network automation efforts.
This guide features five steps to get started with network automation and build your own framework for success. Let’s take a look at each.
1. Identify Tasks & Use Cases
Network automation success starts with the right use cases. Choosing use cases that are either too big or too small can leave your project dead before it even truly began. It’s important to understand where to start with network automation based on the value your uses cases would deliver for your organization.
To determine the lowest hanging fruit, there are a few questions to consider such as which activities consume most of your day, which are you currently unable to accomplish because of lack of time, are there any existing automation efforts underway in scripts, spreadsheets, etc, and more.
Once determined, you can establish a clean configuration baseline for each and evaluate the requirements for each, so you know exactly where to begin.
2. Select the Right Technology
Once you’ve selected your use case, the next step is to determine the right technology to help accomplish it. This raises the age old question, do you build the capability in-house using existing technologies and open-source components (otherwise referred to as a tools approach), or do you take a platform approach approach and implement a fully functional, pre-integrate automation platform?
Each provides its own value, but it’s best to understand the available options and choose the right tools and technologies that provide the most efficient path (time and cost) to benefits, while enabling the broadest set of use cases to be automated. Once compared, the advantages of choosing a platform over a tools approach becomes clear.
3. Understand Roles & Skills
Now that you know what you’re automating and what you’re using to automate it, the next best step is to determine the right roles and skills and define a team structure that maximizes the value of domain technical expertise while minimizing the need for large-scale re-skilling of resources will ensure network automation success.
The unfortunate truth is that network operations are still siloed, but democratization is essential for designing and implementing effective and efficient network automations.
Uncover How to Structure Your Automation Team >
4. Determine Automation Process Management
The process model for automation is a critical component of the automation strategy. Without an effective process, automation activities would lose the ability to align with business imperatives, and at the same time would lack the structure to design, implement and refine automation use cases reliably and efficiently.
Start Planning Your Automation Management >
5. Measure Automation Value with the Right Metrics
The last step, and arguably one of the most important is being able to measure automation success. Without understand what’s working and what could be optimized for better improvement, you’ll never be achieving the most value possible. In order t do that, you must understand the key metrics that can help teams measure the impact and build their business case for network automation and drive success.
By taking all five of these steps, teams are instantly on their way to the achieving network automation success. To learn more about how to build an automation strategy that turns away from the common tool-centric approach and relies on clearly defined components of success, check out the “Building an Automation Factory to Transform Network Operation” white paper here.
Our mission is to ensure the barrier to entry for network automation is as frictionless and easy as possible so teams can start reaping the true benefits it can provide from the very beginning. If you’re ready to get started with your network automation initiatives, you can create your free account to access the full Itential Automation Platform here.
Rich Martin
Director of Technical Marketing ‐ Itential
Rich Martin is the Director of Technical Marketing at Itential. Previously, Rich has worked at several networking vendors as a both a Pre-Sales Systems Engineer and Systems Engineering Manager but started his career with a background in software development and Linux. He has a passion for automation in the networking domain, and at Itential he helps networking teams to get started quickly and move forward successfully on their network automation journey.
