Network Automation Roadmap

Chapter 3. Assessing Organizational Readiness for Network Automation

The first two chapters of this report described how and why serious network automation is not a challenge but a necessity for any medium or large organization. Only companies with a network that can quickly, automatically, and proactively adapt to new conditions are always ready to seize new business opportunities or recover from incidents. Before embarking on this network automation journey, however, network administrators and their leadership teams need to really know what they know about their network and possibly what they do not know. This process of assessing organizational readiness starts with a clear picture of the current state. Only then is it possible to lay out the areas where a specific network can be automated, along with the ways and times to do it that are optimal for that network.

On a related note, it is worth pointing out that preparing for network automation can also expose the strengths and weaknesses of an organization itself along with those of its network, which can provide important insights on improving its way of working.

It is not uncommon for an organization to ignore or forget how and why some of its own in-house tools were developed, how they evolved over the years, and their implications for the future of its network. To put together a simple but concrete example, consider the very common case of a script created years ago to monitor or reconfigure remote network devices via ...