By Ernest Lefner, Chief Product Officer, Gluware
It’s Friday at 4 PM. Your network operations team is preparing for another OS upgrade weekend. The maintenance window is approved. The runbooks are ready. Everyone has cleared their personal schedules, knowing they’ll spend the next 48 hours remotely connected, methodically working through hundreds of devices.
Your team members have already had the conversation with their families: “I’ll be working all weekend again.” Another missed soccer game. Another cancelled dinner. Another weekend where the job comes first.
In 2026, this shouldn’t be normal. But for most enterprise network teams, it absolutely is.
The Current Reality
Most enterprises limit major network OS upgrades not because that’s optimal for security, but because they’re so disruptive.
Here’s what manual upgrades actually look like: SSH into each device individually. Run the upgrade commands. Wait. Watch for errors. When something fails – and something often fails – troubleshoot it manually. Document everything. Move to the next device. Repeat for every single device. For enterprises with hundreds or thousands of devices, this process can stretch across multiple weekends or even months.
Emergency security patches are even worse. When a critical vulnerability drops, your weekend plans evaporate. The team scrambles to patch devices before attackers can exploit them, knowing that their manual processes put them in an uphill battle against faster-moving threats.
The human cost is real. According to the Upwork Research Institute, 71% of IT workers report feeling burned out, with network engineers facing particularly intense pressure from on-call responsibilities and weekend maintenance windows. Network teams aren’t just tired – many are leaving for companies that have figured out there’s a better way.
The 300x Difference
There are several advantages to intelligent automation. Organizations using Gluware have seen OS upgrades run 300 times faster than manual methods. One major medical center now completes stack OS upgrades in just one hour with zero defects. The same task that once consumed an entire weekend now finishes before lunch.
But speed is only part of the story. Automated upgrades are fundamentally safer. Pre-checks verify device readiness before any changes begin. Post-checks confirm successful completion. If something goes wrong, automatic rollback prevents damage. No more crossing your fingers and hoping the upgrade doesn’t brick a critical switch at 2 AM.
The multi-vendor reality that usually multiplies complexity with different commands, file formats, and upgrade procedures? Gluware’s OS Manager handles it all – Cisco, Juniper, Arista, Fortinet, and many more across 22 vendors – from a single platform. Your team just defines what needs to be upgraded; the platform handles all the vendor-specific complexity.
What Your Team Does Instead
When OS upgrades stop consuming weekends, network teams can focus on what actually matters to your organization: optimizing application performance, integrating cloud services, and strengthening security postures.
Instead of waiting for the next maintenance window, teams address vulnerabilities immediately. A critical patch drops on Tuesday? It’s deployed by Wednesday, not three months from now during the quarterly upgrade marathon.
This shift also transforms careers. Engineers and operators develop automation skills, learn new technologies, and tackle initiatives that actually advance the business. They go home on time. They take real vacations. They stop looking for greener pastures on job search sites.
The Bottom Line
After 20 years in network operations at Fidelity, Bank of America and beyond, I’ve seen too many talented team members burn out on tasks that should be automated. The technology exists today to give your team their weekends back while actually improving network security and reliability.
Every weekend your team spends manually upgrading devices is a weekend they could be innovating, learning, or simply living their lives.
About the Author
Ernest Lefner comes to Gluware with over 20 years of financial services IT Leadership experience. Ernest Lefner has held a variety of roles in his career including an executive role at Ernst & Young, and 13+ years building and leading the Fidelity Investments Network Product Management, Cyber Security Engineering organizations. In addition, Ernest spent 5 years as a change agent driving change across infrastructure at Bank of America and most notably built the Network, Voice, and Security Architecture and Engineering organizations during the insourcing of the network from HP. Ernest has also been a powerful industry presence through co-founding the industry organization known as ONUG (Open Networking Users Group) which is focused on sharing IT experiences between members to help the adoption of complex technology like software-defined infrastructure, Automation, and Cloud. Ernest also spent 12 years in the United States Air Force and is passionate about Veterans causes and gives back to the community through his participation and leadership on the North Texas advisory board for Npower organization focused on free training and transitioning of veterans and underprivileged youth into new careers in IT.
