Where Are You on Your Automation Journey?

In my time delivering network automation solutions with Itential, I’ve seen organizations and teams at every level of automation adoption — from those who are implementing ambitious self-serve networking offerings to those who are only nominally familiar with automation at all. As a company, Itential has spent much of our time positioned ahead of the market, speaking to customers who viewed our solutions as aspirational or even science fiction-like. But in recent years we’ve seen IT leaders and organizations make big strides toward more mature, organization-wide network automation strategies.

With Itential’s position as a market leading vendor, we’ve had the opportunity to take part in key automation conversations from day one. Our team has a lot of experience offering context and insight around how the automation journey works. After all, an organization only moves through their automation journey once – we see team after team move through the process. Based on that knowledge and perspective, we’ve created a Network Automation & Orchestration Maturity Model that organizations can use to understand where they currently stand on the automation journey and what next steps will lead to progress.

The evolution model represents the 4 stages that an organization or a team within an organization moves through on their automation journey, from zero automation to a stage where they’re able to deliver network infrastructure automations for consumption by end users (self-serve). Each stage represents a significant evolution in the scale of automation efforts.

It’s helpful to try to understand where your organization or team is to define your immediate and future automation goals and gain an understanding of the steps you’ll need to take to reach them. Let’s break down the four stages, the types of tools and processes that make up each stage, and the key factors for determining when you’re ready to evolve.

The first stage in the model represents network management that is done without an overarching automation strategy. Network activities are often done manually, with disparate individuals writing scattered automations for only their own tasks. At this stage, change management is slow, human error is too frequent, and the network team is often seen as the roadblock to rapid IT service delivery.

How to Evolve

If your network team engages in little to no automation, the first step is to pick up open-source tooling that enables automation such as Python or Ansible and start small, working your way up and building an automation library to handle routine, repeatable networking tasks. You can check out our tips to get started with network automation here.

This stage is where many network teams sit today. The average team has started their network automation journey, leveraging scripting technologies like Python or Ansible or packaged, off-the-shelf offerings like HPNA, SolarWinds or Cisco DNA Center and has built automations for day-to-day activities such as software upgrades, device backups, and configuration management. This stage is characterized by a focus on day-to-day networking activities, with engineers looking to automate to alleviate their own workloads. 

The value of automation at this stage is clear – time and effort engineers would have previously spent manually performing routine activities is freed up for solving more complex networking issues. But these task-focused automations are limited to the specific execution of the network modifications rather than automating the full change management process. The time it might save an individual engineer, or even a team, does not extend to the end-to-end process, where activities such as data gathering from sources of truth, manual pre- and post-checks, and managing tickets that naturally come along with any network change are still sources of delay.

If your network team builds automations for specific network tasks, how do they ensure security? How do they address pre- and post-checks, input validation, and other guardrails to an automation script? And can they share their scripts for others in their team or wider IT organization to use?

How to Evolve

One of the hurdles teams can sometimes face when they start to hit against the limits of scripts is a kind of inertia – a potential vendor solution may change up how they need to approach automation, or it might not work well with the smaller task automations that are already built. The best way to ensure your task automations are delivering the value they’re capable of and to extend and evolve without losing investment you’ve made is to adopt an integration-focused automation solution. A platform that can ingest your team’s existing automation assets and expose them for use in automation workflows enables teams to add automation to the processes that surround a network change – not only does this maximize your current automation efforts, but it also sets the stage for making your next step on your automation journey.

At this point, most teams will have hit the limits of what they can accomplish with scripts and similar tools. The transition from task automation to process orchestration requires extensibility and scalability that can be found in third-party automation and orchestration solutions. Teams and organizations who have progressed to the orchestration stage have developed maturity with their automations and have shifted to an automation-first mindset: automation workflows are built out from ticket opening to ticket closure, enabling the network team to operate at a speed that brings them in line with the rest of the IT organization.

This is the first stage in our model where the business value of automation really starts to skyrocket. Teams can perform network changes at speed while maintaining security, and they can update any required ITSM systems to ensure all the parts of a change process are taken care of. The automations can integrate east and west across different network and IT systems, so that processes such as opening or closing a ServiceNow ticket can be included in an automation workflow within the automation platform itself. Network teams are enabled to manage the network across greater scale and at greater speed than before.

To maximize the value of process orchestration, you should look to ensure an automation-first mindset where the team is comfortable using automation to solve problems. This is achieved with time and practice as the team begins to automate across larger processes, but also by utilizing the right platform that provides the network team with the tools to scale their automation efforts. A tool like Itential that enables process orchestration through wide-ranging integration capabilities enables network teams to approach any aspect of their infrastructure with automation in mind.

How to Evolve

How does your team ensure automation delivers value and fast service to other IT end users? How does network automation fit into the IT architecture overall – does it provide significant value to other teams and to leadership? How are business goals factored in? 

As a network team matures in its process orchestration approach, these questions start to arise – and despite the power of end-to-end automation and orchestration, they can be left temporarily unanswered. But with the right automation strategy and a powerful, comprehensive vendor solution that enables your team’s automation efforts to scale with knowledge, the team can progress to a stage where they’ve answered all those questions and more – reaching what we’ve identified as the final target state for an automation journey, where automation provides maximum value across the network infrastructure and the IT organization as a whole.

For teams and organizations taking a forward-looking approach to automation, self-serve network automation is the end goal. In the self-serve delivery model, end users can request network services just like cloud services, and the team is fully enabled to adopt NetDevOps and treat their network infrastructure as code – which includes doing things like pipeline regression testing for more robust validation. Also, the scope of automation efforts extends beyond just the network team to encompass internal and external teams.

Automations will integrate with other systems northbound via the automation platform’s API. This enables automation assets to exist in other systems as distinct services. A prime example of northbound integration for self-serve automation is Itential’s recently launched certified ServiceNow app. Itential integrates with ServiceNow via northbound API exposure to add network automations published by the network team to their organization’s ServiceNow environment. Then, a ServiceNow user can select an automation from a dynamically discovered list, input the required variables as dictated by the network team, and run the automation after an input validation step. This cloud-like user experience greatly increases consumption of automations the team has already built, raising the value of existing investment.

The Itential ServiceNow app is just one example, but it illustrates the larger mindset and approach that enables self-serve networking. A team that can leverage the full potential of automation will see unique benefits of self-serve networking that enhance their capabilities. By providing comprehensive integration, enabling easy exposure of automation assets, and integrating sources of truth and service assurance with each service offering, a self-serve model will meet the scale, speed, and security needs of today’s (and tomorrow’s) network infrastructure.

Whether you’re looking to start from square one, or take the final jump to deliver network services to all your end users, Itential’s API-first, integration-focused platform has the capabilities to help you progress on your automation journey. 

Take a deeper dive into the Network Automation and Orchestration Maturity Model to learn where you are today and what practical next steps will help you evolve.