By Ernest Lefner, Chief Technology Officer, Gluware
Wake up. Check the dashboard. Manually update firewall rules. Investigate configuration drift. Troubleshoot the same recurring issues. Schedule next month’s OS upgrades…
Wake up. Check the dashboard. Manually update firewall rules. Investigate configuration drift. Troubleshoot the same recurring issues. Schedule next month’s OS upgrades…
In the 1993 film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray’s character is trapped in a time loop, reliving the same day over and over. For many network operations teams, this isn’t just a movie plot – it’s their reality.
Skilled teams are stuck performing repetitive manual tasks on increasingly complex networks. Business demands accelerate while security threats multiply. Meanwhile, most enterprises remain trapped in operational loops that consume capacity without creating value.
What if you could break the loop? Not just for one task, but systematically across your entire network operations? What would that unlock for your organization?
The Three Loops
These loops aren’t edge cases. They’re the daily reality consuming 80% of NetOps capacity.
OS Upgrades: A critical vulnerability requires patching 2,000 devices. You schedule maintenance windows, download images, and begin the manual upgrade process. Weeks later, you’re only halfway done because three different firmware versions require three different approaches, and the CLI syntax changed between releases.
Risk and Compliance: During a recent emergency, someone made a quick firewall change. Two weeks ago, a contractor updated SNMP settings on 40 devices. Yesterday, a firmware update reverted a critical security policy. Your network is drifting from its intended state, creating compliance gaps that compound between audits. When audit season arrives, you spend three days manually verifying configurations, capturing screenshots, and compiling reports. By then, 30% of your devices may have already fallen out of policy. The operational risk is real: you’re always discovering yesterday’s problems instead of preventing tomorrow’s and won’t know the full extent until an audit flags the violations – or a breach exploits them.
Routine Troubleshooting: The ticket queue shows the same five issues you’ve resolved hundreds of times. Authentication failures. Certificate expirations. ACL misconfigurations. Your senior engineers—the ones who should be designing your SD-WAN migration—are instead fixing the same problems they fixed last Tuesday.
Why Smart Teams Are Made to Stay Stuck
The problem isn’t lack of knowledge or effort. Many enterprises have smart engineers, supportive leadership, genuine commitment to automation—and yet the loops persist. Why?
“We’ll script our way out.” Python scripts deliver impressive early wins. Then you scale to production and discover every vendor implements the same function differently. Firmware updates break your syntax. Your three-week standardization project becomes a maintenance nightmare.
“General-purpose tools need network intelligence.” Your automation tools are powerful, but networks require network-specific understanding. Multi-vendor CLI quirks, state validation, firmware variations across thousands of devices—these aren’t problems that general automation tools were designed to solve. They need purpose-built network intelligence layered on top.
“We don’t have time to automate.” The brutal irony: you’re too busy with manual work to automate the manual work. Urgent always beats important, until a major outage forces the conversation you’ve been avoiding.
The real cost isn’t just your team’s time. It’s business agility you’re sacrificing, security posture you’re compromising, competitive advantage you’re conceding to organizations that broke their loops years ago.
Breaking the Loop
The organizations that break free share three characteristics:
They automate their brownfield reality. Most enterprises can’t rip and replace their existing infrastructure. Successful automation works with Cisco, Juniper, Arista, HPE, Palo Alto and anything else you’ve deployed. It handles the CLI quirks, firmware variations, and vendor-specific implementations that make enterprise networks complex.
They verify outcomes, not just commands. Pushing a configuration change is easy. Confirming it achieved the intended result across thousands of devices with different firmware versions? That requires continuous state awareness. The best automation doesn’t just execute – it validates, detects drift, and remediates automatically.
They build on what they have. Your team already uses Ansible, Python, Git, and other automation tools. Rather than replacing these investments, successful approaches enhance them with network-specific intelligence. The goal isn’t to start over. It’s to extend what you’ve built with capabilities designed for network complexity.
Breaking the loop isn’t about working harder. It’s about changing the game entirely.
The Day After Groundhog Day
In Groundhog Day, Phil Connors doesn’t escape by brute force or by working harder at the same tasks. He breaks free by fundamentally changing his approach—investing in long-term growth instead of short-term fixes.
Network automation works the same way.
When organizations break the loops, the transformation is immediate. Tasks that consumed days complete in minutes. Configuration drift drops by 99.9%. OS upgrades that took weeks now finish in hours—with zero defects. Most critically, engineers who spent their time firefighting now architect the capabilities that drive competitive advantage.
Breaking free means recognizing what successful organizations already know: network automation isn’t a side project or a nice-to-have capability. It’s the foundation for everything your business needs to do next—whether that’s implementing zero-trust architecture, scaling infrastructure to support AI workloads, or responding to security threats in hours instead of weeks.
After 20 years in this industry, I can tell you: tomorrow looks exactly like today unless you change something fundamental. The loops don’t break themselves.
