At a time when the world is struggling with a massive health crisis that has sent market economies into a tailspin and disrupted untold lives, it’s hard to think about anything other than maintaining business continuity and returning to normalcy. How do enterprises avoid additional furloughs and layoffs and keep the lights on with a workforce that’s largely unable to leave home due to sweeping shelter-in-place orders?
As a CEO of a technology company, I want to share some thoughts on application delivery automation – an emerging approach designed to assist NetOps, DevOps and SecOps teams in their core missions and to deliver compliance and business agility via low-code network automation. This is done via visual workflows and self-servicing to manage critical IT and security infrastructure, even when employees can’t physically be in the office.
For starters, connected devices seem to be growing faster than the population. Manual infrastructure management is no longer a viable option.
The modern enterprise-defined data center is a collection of multivendor components that are often hosted on a combination of public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures. It's a blend of brownfield (legacy technology) and greenfield (virtualized, containerized microservices, CI/CD, agile, open and programmable) deployments.
According to Cisco’s Annual Internet Report, in just three years, the number of devices connected to IP networks will outnumber the global population 3 to 1, with 29.3 billion networked devices by 2023, up from 18.4 billion in 2018. That’s nearly four devices per person, all relying on extensive infrastructure that requires high-touch provisioning, configuration, security, servicing and monitoring to keep things running.
Today’s application engineers are typically not experienced coders and don’t possess extensive knowledge of the complex connections between available networks, firewalls, routers, switches and security certificates that enable enterprise applications to work. Most app delivery users are trying to push configuration changes through individual manufacturer-provided device GUIs/consoles, command lines, in-house tools or various islands of automation involving IT service management, scripting or an assortment of configuration management tools.
While this disjointed approach may have been sufficient in the past, the lack of standardization, centralized policies and consistent governance procedures are putting today’s enterprises at risk, threatening to disrupt application availability, security and compliance.
The exponential growth of network devices and apps mandates a fundamentally different approach based on automation and self-servicing capabilities that fully abstract the complexity of the modern data center from the app service teams to help support their CI/CD pipeline and the DevOps movement.
While the task of automating the management and orchestration of major IT procedures for the entire data center may sound daunting initially, in practice, implementing a fully automated application delivery solution can be simple and straightforward. Here are a few things you need to consider:
1. Focus on self-service capabilities for application owners
The goal of automated network management and orchestration is to eliminate manual steps for pushing configuration changes to myriad devices and replace them with automated provisioning tasks.
When you build a repeatable and compliant network infrastructure and workflows that map to your business processes, you can give your end users the ability to self-service and launch automation. When a new service needs to be built, application engineers no longer need to wait for IT to scope, provision and deploy required infrastructure updates – they can use automated workflows to push required changes.
2. Make automation intuitive
Network automation and orchestration solutions that are visual and intuitive tend to be more easily accepted – and adopted – by app delivery service consumers.
When application teams can build their own automation workflows using drag-and-drop components and blueprints, they’re more likely to venture into the territory that traditionally exists as an exclusive domain of network engineers. Visual self-service workflows, especially these days, when most IT teams are working remotely, can reduce deployment times, eliminate bottlenecks and put the application team back in control of their processes.
3. BYOA: Bring your own automation
As I mentioned earlier, most large organizations already have some level of automation in place. These solutions may be scattered and not standardized or scalable – but it’s a start. So, when you're laying a foundation for your data-center-wide automation infrastructure, it’s wise to consider solutions that work with the tools already in place, rather than completely replacing them.
Truly intelligent automation could function as a master orchestration engine that consumes and reuses automation flows, recipes and templates from a variety of other tools and augments them with features such as configuration intelligence, low-code automation/orchestration and API wrappers to help provide forward compatibility for your enterprise’s continuous digital transformation.
4. Maintaining focus on applications
Networks and their components are there to support applications. And applications, both customer-facing and those on the back end, need to be constantly updated with new features, functions, platform support and integrations.
Agile and DevOps were created to facilitate faster application delivery, but when IT is unable to update the infrastructure that’s required to run these applications, the whole rapid development concept comes to a halt. An application-centric approach to network automation can get your team's visibility into the heterogeneous application infrastructure to help troubleshoot issues and outages faster and reduce application downtime.
Conclusion
Companies can’t build new ways of working with old technology, processes or tools. Businesses that acknowledge the need for automation today will have a competitive advantage over those that don’t.
In these trying times, many organizations are putting off making any changes to their processes and tool sets, concerned only with keeping things running until global restrictions are lifted and they are allowed to resume “business as usual.” But perhaps now is the time to reevaluate existing processes, identify inefficiencies and consider technologies that could not only help you get through the current challenges, but better equip your business for future growth.
The number and complexity of applications are growing exponentially – automation can help you keep up with this growth and set the stage for more capable and efficient IT operations going forward.
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May 27, 2020 at 06:12PM
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Shaping The Future Through Network Automation - Forbes
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