By 2025, Gartner expects that 25% of enterprises will be automating over half of their networking activities. To achieve this shift toward more automation, organizations are increasingly turning to network automation solutions to reduce cycle times for network activities, improve agility and efficiency, and lower costs to align with digital and cloud strategies. In fact, networking leaders often cite network automation as one of the top three strategic priorities and Gartner claims its client inquiries have nearly doubled the past two years as organizations look to leverage the technology to meet their business objectives.
However, despite the apparent benefits of network automation, over 65% of enterprise networking activities are still being performed manually. This lack of automation leads to bottlenecks in provisioning and in incident resolution, while increasing the likelihood of human errors. As a result, infrastructure, operations, and cloud management leaders are looking to shift from “ClickOps” whereby most processes are performed manually, enabled by fingers “clicking” on keyboards to “NetDevOps” typically associated with applying DevOps and/or CI/CD practices to networking activities, which requires automation to be successful.
It’s clear network automation has its overwhelming benefits. But with so many options and a fragmented landscape of tools that only provide limited automation, let’s explore how best to evaluate the right tool to help achieve your business goals.
How to Evaluate the Right Network Automation Tool for Your Organization
Network automation tools allow for increased agility and efficiency, allowing NetOps teams to make network changes across hundreds, thousands, or more devices in short periods of time, shortening the change process, from ticket creation to ticket closure.
To help infrastructure leaders identify the right tools needed to evolve from manual network activities (“ClickOps”) to automated activities (“NetDevOps”), Gartner released their 2022 Market Guide for Network Automation Tools. The report shares insight on the capabilities to look for when determining where to invest in network automation tools.
Critical Capabilities Needed for Network Automations Tools:
- Allow you to leverage your existing network automation investments, by supporting existing network automation tools already in place (Ansible or Python, for example).
- Allow you to capture and store both device configurations (configuration files) and operational network state (active routing tables, for example).
- Have turnkey GA supported integration plugins with the relevant tools and vendors in your environment such as ServiceNow, Teams, Slack, vCenter, Splunk, or Kubernetes.
- Prefer vendors that offer published, open, restful APIs that expose more than 90% of functionality. This allows for integration with other tools and for the export of data.
- Allow you to create customized workflows across multiple vendors in a simplified fashion, versus rigid out-of-the-box pre-canned options.
- Treat public cloud services as a first-class citizen, and can automate networking services inside of AWS, Azure, or your preferred public cloud provider.
Itential Named a Representative Network Automation Vendor
Itential is pleased to have been included in the Market Guide as a “Representative Vendor” for the third consecutive time.
Itential is the only automation platform built to support both network and cloud, making it easy for enterprise organizations to automate from ticket creation to ticket closure, ensuring network configuration and compliance, reducing manual operations, and simplifying hybrid cloud network management. Let’s dive into how the Itential Automation Platform stacks up to Gartner’s recommended capabilities:
- Bring Your Own Automation: Itential enables network teams to leverage work and investment in existing automation solutions such as Ansible, Python, Nornir, Terraform, etc. and securely organize, run, and share their library of CLI automations so they don’t have to start from scratch.
- Configuration Automation: Easily automate the entire network configuration process, from device backup to Golden Configuration standardization, and automated remediation and validation. Itential is the only solution that combines configuration and automation in a unified solution.
- Out-of-the-Box Integrations: With over 150+ Pre-Built Integrations to every IT and network system, teams can extend their automations outside of the change itself from ticket creation to ticket closure, or use the Itential Adapter Builder and build your own.
- API First: Itential’s vendor-agnostic solution connects to everything and acts as an aggregated network API.
- Drag-and-Drop Workflow Builder: Low-code environment allows you to build your own automations or leverage Itential’s library of Pre-Built Automations, built on industry best practices for all top use cases.
- Multi-Domain Automation: Itential is the only solution built to automate across all physical, virtual, public cloud and multi-cloud environments.
To learn more about Itential, schedule a meeting with one of our automation experts here or if you’re already ready to get started, create your free account here and start using Itential today.
To read the full report, download your complimentary report here (research available for Gartner customer).
Kristen H. Rachels
Chief Marketing Officer ‐ Itential
Kristen serves as Chief Marketing Officer for Itential, leading their go-to-market strategy and execution to accelerate the adoption and expansion of the company’s products and services.
