Key Network Automation Insights from the Gartner I&O Conference

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of attending one of my favorite events, Gartner’s IT Infrastructure, Operations, & Cloud Strategies Conference in Las Vegas, along with our CTO Chris Wade. This year’s I&O event was a few months’ worth of industry insights and key recommendations packed into a few short days. As I reflect on the important learnings from the conference, I want to take the opportunity to share how the network landscape is changing so teams can better prepare for what’s ahead.

I&O leaders have a vital role to play in transforming and enhancing organizations’ network capabilities to meet their customers’ needs. There’s a lot of value to be gained by adopting key innovations in the networking space, and leaders need to tackle their organizations’ network solutions in the right way.

Let’s dive into our key takeaways from the event.

Today’s Network: Change, Change, & More Change

Across all the talks at the conference, a couple themes were universal. First is the fact that we’ve already seen rapid, significant change in how organizations function during the last few years when it comes to their network. Networks are growing more complex by the day, and organizations are relying on them more and more to do business. The second theme is that even with all the change we’ve seen so far, we’re standing on the edge of an even greater leap. The importance of the network will only continue to increase, and innovations that were once seen as niche will become the norm.

In Gartner’s Research Vice President of Networking Andrew Lerner’s talk, “Innovations Driving the Future of Networks,” he outlined the key areas for innovation that organizations need to explore to get the most out of their changing networks. Three of these crucial innovations are tightly connected with network automation: NetDevOps, multi-cloud networking, and Network-as-a-Service (NaaS). Comprehensive network orchestration that integrates automation across all network infrastructure is needed to support and enable these three innovation areas.

Tomorrow’s Network: Key Innovations in Networking for 2023

NetDevOps, the practice of applying DevOps software practices to networking activities, necessitates an automated network pipeline with different network activities working in tandem. Testing and automation are baked into the whole system, and any organization with a mature approach to network automation needs to have a NetDevOps mindset.

With multi-cloud networks becoming increasingly common, the value of automating just individual tasks with Python scripts, Ansible Playbooks, and Terraform Plans can’t scale enough to meet business needs. Organizations need their automations to drive efficiency, and if network engineers are stuck in an endless cycle of manual checking and integration processes to ensure these discrete automations are working as part of the overall network change process, they won’t see the payoffs that automation promises. Only an integration-focused network automation solution can meet the need that multi-cloud networking creates.

Network-as-a-Service is here and here to stay — organizations looking to stay ahead of the innovation curve and continue to scale need to look to automation platforms that can enable NaaS. The big advantages of robust NaaS are that service offerings are dynamically scalable and expose self-service interfaces directly to customers, allowing for easy configuration. An integrated, scalable network automation solution needs to be able to synergize with these advantages.

It takes a comprehensive, integration-focused network automation solution to deliver in all three of these areas.

Gartner’s Network Automation Recommendations

Simon Richard, VP Analyst on the Gartner for Tech Professionals Operations research team, gave a talk highlighting how Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is crucial for how organizations approach the process of automating and managing their network. In his talk, Simon delivered Gartner’s process recommendations for organizations looking at how they automate their network infrastructure. This process starts with engineers building task-based scripts and ends with picking a commercial tool to deliver a comprehensive, self-service, end-to-end network automation solution that brings everything together. IaC was especially highlighted as a vital component of a robust networking ecosystem. The value that an IaC network orchestration solution can deliver by being scalable and easily manageable is crucial to meeting organizations’ growing network needs. The importance of this kind of approach was highlighted all throughout the conference. Even then, though, the recommendations Gartner made still leave a little too much on NetOps’ plate.

In the steps between scripting and selecting a commercial solution, Gartner recommends organizations build automations for baselining, reporting, and configuring backups. The responsibility for creating a basic network Source of Truth (NSoT) is left to NetOps too, including automating backups for configurations, version control, and even creating configuration templates in-house. The full services range that a market-leading network automation platform can offer is still underestimated even by those who understand the importance of scaling their network automation efforts. This is where Itential comes in.

How Itential Supports Today’s Network & Tomorrow’s Network

With the Itential Automation Platform (IAP), organizations don’t need to wait until they’ve taken all those staging steps before looking to integrate their network automations. Itential is capable of meeting organizations’ network needs at any stage of the network automation journey. Within the platform, network engineers can use individual automations as part of a visual workflow builder, allowing automations to function as parts of true end-to-end processes instead of being siloed by themselves. They can create new automations and immediately slot them right into the same, single-interface application. IAP enables DevOps and NetDevOps teams to build automations that can be leveraged in CI/CD pipelines along with Itential’s NetOps pipeline capabilities, which enable building, testing, validation and deployment of network changes for network IaC. Plus, Itential’s library of 300+ Pre-Built Automations and Adapters covers a breadth of common networking activities and network platforms, allowing for easy integration between all the tools engineers already use. It’s thanks to all these cool features in our platform that we landed on the Gartner 2022 Cool Vendors in Network Automation list.

When it comes to network automation, organizations need to look ahead — networks are growing more complex every day, across thousands of devices, multiple cloud environments, and dozens of different network solutions for validation, orchestration, staging and deployment, and every other networking activity. At Gartner’s I&O event, I was thrilled to see I&O leaders are poised to take some big steps to tackle new network challenges. But there’s even more that can be achieved. With Itential, you can go beyond the projections and recommendations Gartner delivered, using a platform that delivers a comprehensive solution that ties together every disparate element of the network in a single, fully integrated application.

Itential is the only network automation and orchestration solution that is both a market and technology leader in the space, and our platform can deliver the powerful self-service, end-to-end automation workflows organizations are looking for. If you’re looking at which network automation solution will work best for your organization, read our blog on Gartner’s Market Guide for Network Automation Tools. If you’re ready to dive in and test drive our platform, sign up here and get started today.