Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Network Automation for Service Providers – A Strategic Imperative Accelerating & Evolving Business Needs
By Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy at Itential
As Network Automation continues to gain momentum with service providers, now is a good time to look at the current state of automation and consider where automation will go in 2021.
Every service provider has implemented some form of automation in their environment – some teams have embraced scripting tools to improve engineer productivity, while others have focused on automation of network-heavy processes. The market has responded by creating a diverse set of tools and approaches. Early adopters have begun to focus on automating larger, more complex business processes. As a result, they’ve encountered some challenges, primarily around how to scale their automation infrastructure to effectively scale for size and complexity.
My prediction for 2021 is that network automation efforts in service providers will accelerate and evolve to meet the business needs related to new technology deployments and the increasing drive to reduce operating expenses.
Acceleration: With initiatives like 5G and mobile edge computing moving from initial implementations to large scale, mass deployment, the workload associated with configuring, deploying and managing the networking activities will quickly surpass the capacity of most engineering teams. Automation efforts will need to focus not only on speed, but on scale. To achieve this high level of scale, it will be critical to eliminate constraining factors, such as:
- Requirements for human involvement in the creation of inputs such as configuration variables, and in the preparation and execution of automations.
- Performance and capacity of the automation systems and tools.
- Ability to efficiently “feed” the automation platform with accurate data, at a velocity that enables the platform to execute as quickly as possible.
Evolution: In many environments, automation began with individuals and later expanded to teams, with each team selecting the automation tools they either had experience with or the tools that made sense for the specific use case. While this approach made it easy for teams to optimize their activities through automation, it created automation gaps. For example, individual activities were automated, but the handoffs between teams were still executed by creating tickets and sending spreadsheets.
In 2021, business leaders will recognize the need for a more strategic approach to automation, first by focusing on the overall business impact of automation, then by re-engineering processes, tool choices, and expectations to be more oriented to an automation-centric model.
By eliminating the automation gaps created by isolated automation efforts, and evolving to a more strategic automation approach, service providers will gain the ability to manage and measure automation activities. Through these efforts, automation teams will gain visibility to the throughput and performance of the automation system, which will enable them to optimize the system and the processes, reducing both effort and time for completion for more complex automation scenarios such as end-to-end service management and multi-domain automation.
Entering the new year, the business challenges that service providers faced in 2020 will increase in intensity. Networking teams will be forced to do more, with fewer people. The only option remaining will be to focus on network automation as a strategic imperative, and to treat it the same way as any other strategic imperative – with careful planning and decisions based on maximizing business impact.
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About the Author
Morgan Stern is a VP of Automation Strategy at Itential. For the majority of his career, Morgan has focused on assisting organizations in maximizing the business impact of new technologies as an architect, consultant, writer, and presenter. In his current role at Itential, he works with Itential’s global customer base in developing and implementing their automation strategies.
