Business Continuity: Why Better Networking Helps you Weather the Storm
Even with an adequate out-of-band (OOB) management path established, managing your network infrastructure can still leave you wanting more efficiency across the board. The good news is, network automation can help you improve your OOB operations, and ultimately your business continuity efforts.
Here’s a brief look at how network automation helps you do away with loads of busywork and lets you scale with ease.
Network Automation Streamlines Business
Nearly 50% of organizations plan to make investments in network automation. The biggest benefits it brings to the table is that it helps streamline processes and fosters more autonomous networking.
Your IT professionals undoubtedly spend plenty of time and effort performing repetitive tasks and manual procedures. These can include routine updating, patching, and data logging, or more involved processes like provisioning resources for new employees.
By introducing network automation to your out-of-band management solution, you can become more efficient and productive with tasks that are completed on their own.
- Automated, error-free workflows perform tasks faster and eliminate human error.
- Downtime can be prevented with automatic health monitoring and self-healing.
- You can standardize compliance by automating policy enforcement and management.
Not only does network automation streamline processes to free up staff for more critical needs, but it also allows for more autonomous networking. With the right orchestration tools, you can introduce programmatic behavior to support network activities like load balancing and provisioning. Instead of involving staff in these activities, which can be inefficient and pose the risk of human error, automation can handle the job quickly and consistently.
You no longer need to keep pulling critical personnel into these tasks, because automation keeps your networking running like a well-oiled machine.
Zero Touch Provisioning Makes Scaling Easy
Scaling can be a challenge without automation. Typically, you need to manually configure devices for deployment, which can leave you open to security threats, repeated human errors, and unreliable provisioning. It doesn’t matter whether you’re expanding your operation by adding 10 sites or 100 sites — having to manually deploy each location increases the potential for error, which can have major consequences now or in the future.
But thanks to zero touch provisioning (ZTP), scaling is secure, consistent, and accurate.
ZTP involves scripting and automation that allow devices to be configured automatically. Developing and testing ZTP in a lab environment is crucial to fine tuning before putting it into play on production networks. This, however, is one of the strengths of automation. It allows you to ensure that your scripts are set up correctly, and then you can deploy quickly and consistently at scale.
ZTP is typically performed for data center locations, however ZPE Systems offers ZTP via the cloud for deploying remote sites and branch offices.