Understanding Roles & Responsibilities for Network Automation
Network automation activities require a unique mix of roles and responsibilities. Democratization is essential for designing and implementing effective and efficient network automations.
Today’s Siloed Network Operations Reality
Duplication and conflict among siloed network operations, DevOps & engineering teams inhibit organizations from accelerating digital transformation initiatives.
The network is getting more complex.
Skills are needed to maintain both old and new technologies.
Re-training network engineers as software developers is unrealistic.
Rip and replace is costly & time intensive.
Why Democratization is Needed
Democratization is focused on providing people with access to technical expertise via a radically simplified experience and without requiring extensive and costly training.
- Enable more participation in network automation – optimize time/effort to deliver automations to the business.
- Remove silos and mitigate network bottleneck – increase number of tasks performed through automation.
- Leverage the right skill for the right task.
- Reduce costs and decrease time to value – deliver maximum value of automation to the business.
How to Bridge the Network & Cloud Gap & Democratize Network Automation
Historically, subject matter experts oriented their skillsets around their technical area of expertise and were not required to be proficient in software development. Conversely, software development experts frequently lack the deep understanding of the specific network technologies, so the only solutions were to either find the rare engineer that possessed both skillsets or to create hybrid teams with a mix of subject matter experts and developers.
To address this gap, consider selecting tools & technology that enable the following:
Expand automation participation and use the right skill for the right task, enable automation for all.
Easy Onramp for Non-Developer
Offload repetitive, time-intensive tasks that require minimal or no software development with pre-packaged, pre-built automation workflows.
Integrate DevOps Principles
Augment network automations with CI/CD pipelines and API Services.
Enable Cloud Architect Participation
Real-time feedback and control of cloud-based applications and infrastructure critical to modern networks.
Ability to Capture Network Tribal Knowledge
Leverage traditional network automation and management practices (Scripts, CLI) for re-use across the organization.
How to Structure Your Network Automation Team for Success
Structuring your network automation team properly can help to avoid the need for extensive training or for making extreme changes to the composition of your existing team. Focus on areas that will maximize business value and volume output, ideally these roles will be staffed by operations and engineers from the network team.
Consider structuring your team as follows in order to leverage your current network team roles for automation projects, without having to reskill or retrain:
Itential’s Network Automation Platform Enables Automation for All
Itential’s primary mission is to provide software that enables network engineers, software developers and IT operations to participate in network automation, bridge the skills gap and enable the largest participation needed to rapidly and efficiently execute their day-to-day network management activities. Itential’s Automation Platform Provides:
Graphical Automation Canvas
Arrange and connect tasks in a workflow to define operations and maintenance processes, mitigating the complexity of software development and further simplifying network automation.
Form Driven Automation
Simplify data gathering processes that are essential for automations; enables users to leverage drag-and-drop methodology or dynamically generate forms based on standard modeling languages such as YANG, TOSCA and YAML.
Intelligent Templates
Enable NetOps teams to define robust and rigorous pre- and post-checks for network changes as well as create configuration models that leverage data to dynamically generate device configurations.
Open APIs
Standardize compliant data structures for allowing large teams to rapidly and easily collaborate and develop network automation workflows.
Built-In Network Intelligence
Eliminate the complexity required to build agnostic automations across various network types and technologies.
Pre-Built Automations
Dozens of common use cases such as software upgrade, golden configuration and compliance, SD-WAN onboarding and more to help NetOps teams jump start their network automation efforts and embed automation design best practices to ensure modularity and reusability.
