Network automation challenges are dampening success rates

• Improved capacity management: 22.9%
• Network/application resiliency: 22.6%
• Accelerated incident response (e.g., mean time to insight, mean time to repair): 21.5%
• Increased/improved collaboration: 21.2%
• Agility (responsiveness to change and business needs): 18.1%
• Reduced regulatory compliance risk: 17.8%
• Empowering lower-skilled personnel to do more: 16.7%
• Capital expense avoidance (e.g., extending life of hardware, maximizing use of installed equipment): 16.7%
• Reduced configuration drift/improved design compliance: 16.7%
• Accelerated time to market for new applications/services: 16.7%

“At the scale we do things with thousands of locations, even doing a little thing like running a simple change or command on a network device is just a huge job,” said a network tools engineer at a Fortune 500 retailer in the EMA report. “Automation just makes life so much easier for people in terms of compliance, gathering config files from devices, running reports, and deployment.”

The EMA data also debunks the idea that network automation will in some way replace IT professionals. According to interviews EMA conducted with 10 anonymous IT leaders, the worry over automation is mitigated by the benefits automation brings.

“Automation takes human error out of the network. We’ve decreased outages by a significant amount,” said a network automation engineer at a large university in the EMA report. “When people hit a button to automate something, we have scripts running so many checks before a change is done. Also, we’ve empowered technicians who lack the skillsets to make changes and write configs. Field teams can be made up of people with lower skillsets, who can go out and hit a button to troubleshoot things.”

Despite the benefits reported by 18% of respondents, many business and technical challenges remain. According to the EMA report, IT leadership issues (buy-in, direction, commitment) were cited by more than 31% of IT leaders. More than one-fourth (26.8%) of the respondents pointed to staffing issues such as skills gaps and staff churn as a business challenge.

“The most challenging thing for me is the lack of network engineers who can contribute to automation,” said a network engineer at a midmarket business services company in the EMA report. “The community is small, and it’s hard to find people who can help you solve a problem.”

Another 25% pointed to budget issues as a pain point, and nearly one-fourth cited conflicts/collaboration issues between groups (e.g., NetOps, DevOps, SecOps). Security policy constraints were also reported by nearly 25% of respondents. Other challenges include difficulty with prioritizing specific use cases for automation (18.6%), unclear business value for investment (16.9%), stakeholder buy-in, engineers resist using automation (16.4%), and customer support limitations (16.4%).