In the post-COVID era, more than half of employees (54.1%) want to work from home at least 3 days a week, according to “Hybrid Is the Future of Work” study, conducted by Stanford University. And when they return to work, they want at least similar office conditions to those of their home offices, if not better. However, the new demands are increasing the burden on IT departments, which are forced to constantly search for solutions to meet both the increased demands of end-users and the changing business requirements. This is the main reason why IT professionals are interested in prioritizing the adoption of network automation solutions.
Although the benefits of network operations automation are well known and have been confirmed by thousands of deployments, there are still some common “myths” surrounding this topic. In this article, we analyze the 5 most popular reasons put forward against the implementation of network automation and why they do not stand up to even the simplest scrutiny.
Myth: Automation Solutions Are Not Mature Enough Yet
The above statement is an obvious misconception. Automation solutions are dynamically evolving. This does not mean that they are not mature, but that their transformation is natural. First, because they must constantly adapt to new business requirements, and second, because vendors are constantly integrating new technologies to improve their performance. For example, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence technologies enable the automatic detection and correction of abnormal behavior of hardware and software components.
Today, network automation solutions help reduce the complexity of management operations, accelerate the detection of problems and the identification of appropriate solutions to fix them, eliminate errors, improve application performance, and increase the agility of business processes. And these are just a few benefits in a longer list.
Myth: Automation Increases Risk
On the surface, this judgement seems pertinent, but when you consider that human error is one of the main causes of unplanned downtime, it’s obvious that this reason has extremely little truth value.
It’s true that when improperly defined network policies and processes are automated, the overall risk increases. But when automation is implemented correctly, it increases the network’s ability to optimize and protect itself, without requiring human intervention and without causing disruptions in the delivery of applications and services. In other words, they have the exact opposite effect of the original statement, which is to reduce risk factors.
Myth: The Network Works Well. We Don’t Need Automation
The pandemic has shown everyone that challenges are not reserved for certain types of businesses, and that security threats no longer discriminate in terms of size or industry. Today, every IT department is facing issues arising from the management of mobile devices, employees working remotely, distributed applications and cloud services, etc. All of these challenges can be addressed more efficiently and cost-effectively with network automation solutions, that also provide higher levels of resilience, flexibility, and scalability for business processes.
Myth: Automation Will Put Us Out of Business
While network automation eliminates many repetitive tasks, it also provides new employment opportunities. For example, automation has created the field of network orchestration, where business needs are translated into network policies that must be aggregated and correlated in a unified way.
Myth: To Deliver Consistent Results, the Network Must Be Fully Automated
“All-or-nothing” or “one-and-done” approaches do not apply to network automation, because the network is constantly evolving to keep up with business needs, emerging threats, end-user requirements and the adoption of new technologies.
During the pandemic, for example, many companies turned to automation to simplify mobile device enrollment or network configuration, provisioning, and management when travel was constrained. The result was fewer trips to workstations, fewer hours of work to install and configure each device across workstations, subsidiaries, or branches and, most importantly, minimal chance of error.
Of course, you don’t have to automate the entire network to take advantage of these benefits. Rather, network experts recommend a step-by-step approach, so that after each step you have time to review the overall situation, understand how automation makes your work more efficient and what new opportunities it offers. Automation should help you increase the sustainability, agility, and flexibility of your business processes so that you can quickly overcome any new challenges that may arise.
