EMA survey shows good use of the technology, with more planned for the future
At this stage of the game, few IT managers would argue against automating at least some network management functions. Who, after all, doesn’t want to reduce error rates or enable streamlined implementation processes?
Network automation clearly is much in use and having a positive effect on organizations, as results from a recent Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) survey show.
For the survey, EMA reached out to more than 100 mid-level network managers, engineers and architects at organizations with at least 1,000 employees. Eighty percent of the respondents indicated they are actively using or in the process of deploying network automation. Participants most commonly said that between 16% and 30% of their network team’s daily administrative tasks have been automated and require no manual intervention or script change. That percentage rose to between 31% and 50% at organizations that had fully deployed network automation, EMA reported.
The most important automation targets, the survey found, are configuration backups, configuration monitoring and IP address management – each of which ranked “very important” or “essential” by respondents. Compliance auditing, workflow/process automation and rollback are not next most important tasks to automate, the survey showed.
Slightly more than half of participants compared their progress on automation to be on par with their systems and application management counterparts. They indicated, however, that more network automation would be needed going forward to better accommodate server virtualization initiatives and compliance demands as well as to save time and account for limitations in staff size.
That said, 43% of respondents signaled that lack of funding could inhibit additional network automation deployments, while 38% and 37%, respectively, indicated the same for concern over reduced control and increased risk.
Based on the survey results, EMA analysts recommend that any organization experiencing more than one or two manual configuration errors per month investigate additional network automation – which they say will reduce, not increase, risk. In addition, EMA advises that network managers should “leverage the successful network automation experiences of their peers as a means to counter unfounded concerns about the technology’s maturity and business value.”
