Are Legacy Network Configuration Tools & Processes Holding You Back from Automating?

The expansion of network infrastructure into multiple cloud platforms brings the challenge of managing cloud-based network infrastructure and services in tandem with an organization’s existing on-prem devices. As a result, ensuring every network device and service in today’s exploded network and cloud infrastructure is in compliance has become increasingly more difficult, resulting in parts of the network drifting from the accepted standard. Without knowing that your entire network is compliant, many network teams find themselves in a situation where they lack trust and confidence in their ability to automate their network.

Are Legacy Tools & Processes Holding You Back from Adopting Network Automation?

Traditional tools for managing network configuration such as SolarWinds (NCM), Microfocus (HPNA) and vendor-centric tools that only support a subset of deployed devices are all antiquated approaches that are only able to support CLI-based network devices. These approaches are difficult to configure, burdensome to operate, and impossible to extend as networking progresses. This poses a difficult position for network managers as too often they are swamped with day-to-day requirements and focused on keeping their head above water instead of seeing what can be done to improve their processes. As a result, they are scared to automate across a network in which compliance isn’t ensured.

As the rate of change to the network increases, it is becoming more difficult to keep up with the regular maintenance and hygiene of the network, which detects whether changes already made to the network have brought it out of compliance. This maintenance process should also provide the ability to validate a proposed network configuration change before it’s applied, ensuring your network never drifts from the defined standard.

How to Assess What’s Holding You Back

To effectively confront and manage the increasingly expanding network, organizations should assess if their current network configuration and compliance management tools and processes are holding them back from adopting true network automation. You have to ask yourself what will ultimately cost your business more:

Do What You’re Doing
Sticking with what you have been doing and trying to endure the inefficiency, unreliability, and drain on resources risking potential security threats or outages?

OR

Doing Something New
Taking a new approach and evaluating network automation solutions that can provide insight into your network across physical and cloud and enable changes to be made across CLI and API infrastructure, validating changes before they are made?

10 Questions to Assess Your Readiness

We’ve compiled a list of 10 questions to help determine if it’s time to take a new modern approach to automate your network configuration and compliance management.

1. Are you managing your network device inventory in spreadsheets?
2. Are you still manually backing up configuration files?
3. Are you and your team swivel chairing across multiple systems and sources to locate and read device configuration files?
4. Are you ‘staring & comparing’ to determine changes between a live configuration & previous back up?
5. Does your Golden Configuration standard for the network only exist in someone’s head?
6. Is your process of network compliance checking accomplished in a manual, ad hoc way?
7. Are you keeping track of every network device’s compliance history through memory & trouble tickets?
8. Are you still manually remediating changes to devices that are out of compliance?
9. Does rolling back a configuration change mean looking at a backup configuration file & making manual changes to the device?
10. Does upgrading all of your network devices to a current software version present a constant backlog to your team?

It’s Time to Modernize & Automate Your Network Configuration & Compliance Management

Our latest eBook is focused on helping you better understand what’s holding you back and why you can’t wait to automate. Dive into each question, what it means, and why you should automate each in the full eBook here.

And if you’re ready to get started automating, check out all of the ways you can easily get started with Itential no matter where you are on your journey.