In that same enterprise report from Gartner, a poll taken at a Gartner’s 2016 U.S. Data Center Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference in December 2016, shows that more than half of the respondents, 54%, have no automated network changes performed today and 37% have only 1% to 25% of network changes automated.
Enterprises are feeling the impact of this as they move to digitize their businesses. Automation has been identified as a top priority to improve responsiveness to the business needs while also reducing network errors, outages and security risks. The challenge enterprises face is that their networks are made up of devices from dozens of vendors, which have been deployed over many years creating a situation sometimes known as “technical debt”.
Public clouds and cloud services are being increasingly leveraged, and they provide many automation tools to spin up and change services quickly, but the legacy network infrastructure they depend on lacks this level of comprehensive management software. The traditional approach to network automation usually comes in two flavors: