Why Build AND Buy Is the Model for Network Automation Success

When organizations look to implement network automation initiatives, network and IT leaders are often faced with the question of Build vs. Buy: does it make sense to leverage open source and DIY tooling, or would your organization get more benefit from a commercial platform?

But the reality is, the choice between DIY and commercial automation isn’t a choice organizations need to make. The vast majority of enterprise organizations employ both commercial platforms and DIY tooling to achieve their network automation goals. According to Enterprise Network Automation: Emerging From the Dark Ages & Reaching Toward NetDevOps, a recent research report by EMA, “more than nine out of 10 organizations build AND buy network automation.”

Organizations are looking for the fastest way to accelerate network and infrastructure operations to empower developers, achieve business agility, and grow revenue. While most enterprise organizations have high-code teams working on DIY network automation already, there is a lot of work to be done, inherent challenges around automation, and a significant different between domain-specific automation and orchestrating processes end-to-end. To accelerate their transformation initiatives, organizations are adopting both platforms and DIY strategies to get the best of both strategies. In their report, EMA found that, often, “organizations create homegrown software to close gaps in their proprietary solutions or vice versa.”

For these reasons and more outlined in the full report, “build versus buy is a false choice.” Successful network automation and orchestration involves choosing the right tools for the right jobs. At Itential, we’ve seen organizations succeed most with an approach that pairs a high-code, DIY-driven automation strategy at the domain level with a low-code orchestration platform play to coordinate workflows a layer above.

94% of companies surveyed in EMA’s report use some type of DIY solution (or multiple) for network automation tooling. 100% of respondents use some kind of vendor-supported automation solution.

Both a DIY-driven approach and a commercial platform strategy bring unique benefits. Within a specific domain, DIY tooling like Python scripts, Ansible Playbooks, and vendor-specific point automation tools and controllers allow teams to build highly customized automations that suit their specific environments.

However, scaling automations can be difficult. Skillsets are a common challenge, and it can be difficult for engineers to share automations with each other in a secure, centralized way. Plus, expanding the consumption of automation scripts beyond a small team can be a slow process. EMA found that teams spend anywhere from 3 to 30 hours per week maintaining, supporting, and debugging DIY automation tools, which slows down automation initiatives.

In addition, orchestration is much more difficult to accomplish with DIY tooling than domain-specific automation. To really drive efficiency and respond to business initiatives around speed and agility, it’s not enough to automate individual tasks. Entire infrastructure workflows can be coordinated end-to-end and delivered as services, similar to services in a public cloud environment, if organizations adopt the right orchestration platform. 100% of organizations surveyed by EMA reported using at least one commercial platform to support automation and orchestration initiatives, citing priorities like speed, scalability, and security as key drivers.

To solve the network and infrastructure service delivery challenge as quickly, efficiently, and reliably as possible, organizations need to rely on both strategies: high-code DIY, and a low-code platform play to scale.

At Itential, we’ve always seen a hybrid DIY and platform approach as the best model for success, and it’s great to see see the industry moving in this direction. Our products are designed to enable teams to make the most of high-code, DIY automation strategies, as well as scale and accelerate their capabilities with orchestration.

With Itential Automation Gateway (IAG), teams can solve common network automation challenges to move faster with confidence. Teams can onboard scripts written in Python, Ansible, or Terraform/OpenTofu, automatically attaching API endpoints to those scripts so they can be consumed in ways that suit your organization’s workflow. In addition, IAG provides crucial enterprise-grade security and authorization features, allowing teams to centralize the management and execution of automation while securely sharing those automations across the rest of the organization.

And with our orchestration platform, teams can pair this supercharged high-code automation strategy with powerful low-code orchestration that integrates with all your network and IT infrastructure platforms, tools, and services. Processes involving multiple touchpoints that once took days can take as little as a few minutes to be executed end-to-end, allowing organizations to deliver services to application developers and other end users much more efficiently.

Let’s say a data center team is building mostly DIY automation scripts with Python, while an SD-WAN team is relying on a vendor-provided controller to automate their own processes. A service might have touchpoints in both of those domains. Itential is able to onboard the data center team’s scripts and attach APIs to them, and it’s also able to integrate with the SD-WAN team’s controller to execute automations within that domain.

This means that a workflow built in Itential could coordinate automations between both of those domains. Further, it can integrate with IPAM and inventory systems, change management systems, and security tools in order to truly drive end-to-end efficiency — taking every step that must be performed to deliver a service, across all the different tools and systems required, and building a single workflow that can deliver that service as a fully orchestrated outcome.

We see our customers driving real transformational change and enhancing operational efficiency when using our solutions. Itential is unique — our products deliver teams the ability to leverage DIY solutions for all the unique advantages they provide while at the same time enabling scale and acceleration through orchestration, transforming the way your network and IT infrastructure supports business processes.

This is the power of a strategy pairing high-code DIY automation with low-code orchestration. When leaders and teams recognize that they don’t need to choose, and they leverage a build AND buy strategy, they can move more quickly and deliver on critical business objectives.

To dive deeper into the build and buy discussion and learn how Itential can help you accelerate your automation initiatives, please reach out and schedule a discussion with our team, or feel free to check out our library of demo videos here.