By Ernest Lefner, Gluware Chief Product Officer and ONUG Co-Founder
In today’s high-velocity business environment, enterprises are striving for agility, resilience, and speed. Yet many still rely on manual or semi-automated network operations that are reactive at best—and brittle at worst. The missing link in the enterprise transformation journey? A true digital nervous system, enabled by intelligent network automation.
From Static Infrastructure to Self-Aware Networks
Just as the human nervous system detects, interprets, and responds to stimuli, the modern enterprise needs a network infrastructure that is aware, adaptive, and autonomous. Traditional network management models—where operators and engineers write scripts, handle repetitive tasks manually, and scramble during outages—no longer meet the demands of multi-vendor, multi-platform, and multi-domain environments.
Intelligent network automation shifts this paradigm. By integrating intent-based decisioning, policy enforcement, and dynamic remediation, it transforms the network from a passive conduit to an active, strategic asset.
The Strategic Edge of Automation
- Speed and Scalability: Eliminate manual bottlenecks and scale configurations, updates, and compliance across thousands of devices within minutes—not days.
- Security and Compliance: Continuously validate configurations, monitor drift, and enforce golden baselines to maintain hardened environments.
- Resilience and Uptime: Detect anomalies, prevent misconfigurations, and automate failovers to reduce downtime and accelerate incident response.
- Operational Efficiency: Free up IT teams from repetitive tasks so they can focus on strategic initiatives like zero trust, SASE, and multi-cloud connectivity.
It’s Not Just Automation. It’s Intelligence
Not all automation is created equal. Intelligent network automation leverages context, state, and policy to make smart decisions. This means using machine reasoning and data-driven insights to execute the right actions at the right time—with or without human intervention.
This is where Gluware leads. Our platform empowers IT teams to orchestrate complex workflows, automate brownfield networks without code, and apply intelligence at scale. We’re helping global enterprises turn their networks into dynamic ecosystems that evolve with their business.
Powering the Next Phase of Digital Transformation
The enterprises thriving in this era are those who treat their networks not as afterthoughts, but as core infrastructure for innovation. Intelligent network automation is not a luxury—it’s the backbone of digital transformation.
In short: If data is the lifeblood of the modern enterprise, intelligent network automation is its nervous system—connecting, sensing, and responding to drive the entire organism forward.
The modern enterprise needs more than speed. It needs intelligence.
If data is the lifeblood of your organization, then intelligent network automation is the digital nervous system—sensing, adapting, and responding in real-time.
At Gluware, we’re helping enterprises move beyond brittle scripts and manual toil to unlock resilience, scalability, and strategic control through automation powered by intelligence.
Read why this shift is mission-critical for any enterprise undergoing digital transformation:
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.
