The document discusses the findings of a research study on enterprise network automation. It surveyed 250 IT professionals and conducted interviews. The key findings include: 1) Enterprises use multiple network automation tools on average, with over 40% using two tools and 34% using three tools. 2) Critical elements for automation include device APIs, embedded zero-touch provisioning, and having a single network source of truth. 3) Top processes automated include security analysis, network management, and configuration management. Key challenges are that automation is too expensive, difficult to implement, and doesn't scale to all tasks.

1. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Shamus McGillicuddy
Research Director
SMcGillicuddy@emausa.com
Enterprise Network Automation
for 2020 and Beyond

2. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Watch the On-Demand Webinar
Slide 2
• Enterprise Network Automation for 2020 and Beyond On-
Demand webinar is available here:
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3. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Featured Speaker
Shamus McGillicuddy
Research Director, EMA
Shamus has more than 12 years of experience in the IT industry,
as an industry analyst and journalist. At Enterprise Management
Associates (EMA), he is the research director for the network
management practice.
Slide 3 © 2019Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

4. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Sponsors
Slide 4 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

5. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Agenda
Slide 5 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
• Research Goals and Methodology
• Network Automation Tools: What Are Enterprises Using?
• Automation Priorities: What Are Enterprises Automating?
• Network Automation Isn’t Easy

6. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Research Goals and Methodology
Slide 6 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

7. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
• Goal: Understand the
state of the art of
enterprise network
automation
• Technologies
• Goals
• Business impacts
• Challenges
• Methodology
• Survey 250 enterprise
IT professionals
engaged with formal,
sponsored network
automation initiatives
• Six focal interviews with
hands-on automation
experts
Slide 7 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Research Goals and Methodology

8. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Network Automation Tools:
What Are Enterprises Using?
Slide 8 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

9. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Classes of network automation technology
used or planned for use
• Most enterprises use
multiple network
automation tools
• 40%: 2 tools
• 34%: 3 tools
• 16%: 4 or more
Slide 9 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
45%
44%
42%
32%
28%
Third-party, multi-vendor network
automation software
General IT automation software
adapted to network devices
Automation solutions embedded in or
applied to a single network vendor
One-off scripts (e.g., scripts written
by network engineering team)
DIY, homegrown automation
software
Sample Size = 250, Valid Cases = 250, Total Mentions = 482
A Single, Off-the-Shelf Solution is Rare

10. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Essential Elements of Automation: Device APIs
52%: “APIs are
critical to my
automation”
44%: “APIs are
helpful, but not
required”
• Cost (vendor
charging license)
• Limited access to
device data
• Poor/outdated APIs
• Inconsistency
across platforms
API challenges
Slide 10 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

11. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Essential Elements of Automation:
Embedded Zero-Touch Provisioning
• 39%: “Critical to my
automation”
• 52%: “Helpful to my
automation”
• Key ZTP features
1. Software image auto-
update/verification
2. Custom provisioning/
config via scripts/
automation tools
3. Unified provisioning
with compute/storage
Slide 11 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

12. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Essential Elements of Automation:
Network Source of Truth
More than 90% have
a source of truth
• 41%: “Essential
to automation”
• 50%: “Helpful to
automation
What do you have?
Single,
authoritative
repository
(26%)
Multiple
authoritative
repositories
(63%)
Multiple
repositories
with conflicts
(10%)
Slide 12 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

13. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Essential Elements of Automation:
Advanced Analytics/AIOps
• 34%: “Essential to
automation”
• 51%: “Helpful to
automation”
• 11%: “Considering it”
• Use cases for analytics
1. Drive automated change via
analytically derived insights
2. Optimize network
health/performance
3. Recommend automated actions
to human operator
4. Translate business logic (intent)
into network actions
Slide 13 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

14. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Analytics and Automation Gaps
• “We use our automation tool to push configs. We want a tool that
can report back that changes pushed out didn’t kill the network.
Right now, we wait for an SNMP trap to tell us if the network went
down. If we do something and nothing happens after 15 minutes,
we know the change was good.”
• Network engineer, very large pharmaceutical company
• “Automation is only as good as the data you receive, and you need
analytics to normalize and interpret the data. We do a lot of that by
hand right now.”
• Network engineer, very large healthcare enterprise
Slide 14 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

15. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTINGSlide 15 © 2019Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Automation Priorities:
What Are Enterprises Automating?

16. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Automation Priorities:
Network Management Processes
• Security analysis/anomaly
detection
• Network state
verification/analysis
• Network operating system
management
• Security incident
remediation
• Network service
orchestration
• Configuration and change
management
Data
center
network
• Security analysis/anomaly
detection
• Network management tool
administration
• Security incident remediation
• Network state
verification/analysis
• Network service
orchestration
• Network fault root cause
analysis/guided remediation
Enterprise
network
Slide 16 © 2019Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

17. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Automation Priorities: Places in the Network
• Network security
(firewalls, etc.)
• Virtual networks
(overlays, VNFs)
• Data center
interconnect/edge
routing
• Layer 4-7 network
devices
Data
center
network
• Wireless LAN
• Remote site LAN
• Public cloud
(IaaS
networking)
• WAN
edge/branch
routing (including
SD-WAN)
Enterprise
network
Slide 17 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

18. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Percentage of tasks
that enterprises are
able to automate on
network devices
Slide 18
37%
32%
31%
30%
30%
30%
29%
Firewalls
Load balancing/application delivery controllers
Data center top-of-rack/leaf switching
Data center core/spine switching
Branch/remote site networking
Campus access switching
Campus core/aggregation switching
Depth of Automation is Shallow

19. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Network Automation Isn’t Easy
Slide 19 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

20. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Challenges with Network Automation Technology
1. Too expensive (26%)
2. Difficult to build/implement (22%)
3. Doesn’t scale (22%)
4. Won’t automate certain tasks/processes (22%)
5. Unstable/poor quality (21%)
6. High administrative overhead (20%)
7. Won’t automate certain places in the network (20%)
8. Won’t automate certain vendors (20%)
Slide 20 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

21. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Business Challenges of Network Automation
1. Security risk (37%)
2. Budget (28%)
3. Culture – staff distrusts/
refuses to use (25%)
4. Skills gaps (25%)
5. Fear of layoffs/redundancy
(23%)
• “Pushback from the old guard. This
automation scares them. ‘You’re taking
things away from us that are part of our
job.’ I think that fear is legitimate. The
future is software.”
• Network automation engineer, large research
university
• “Even people enthused about automation
struggled to get on the right page. People
loved the config capabilities, but they
spent so much time manually collecting
data from the network for troubleshooting.
They couldn’t visualize how our solutions
could help them.”
• Network reliability engineer, midsized media and
entertainment company
Slide 21 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

22. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Success Does Not Equal Trust
• 44% fully trust their
automation
• 50% partially trust
automation
• 5% don’t trust it at all
• “You can trust automation as much
as you can trust your own ability.
It’s software on a machine that you
control. If you program your robot
incorrectly, it’s going to do
something incorrectly.”
• Network automation engineer, large research
university
• “We trust the tools, but we don’t
trust the data we are using.”
• Network reliability engineer, midsized media and
entertainment company
Slide 22 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

23. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTINGSlide 23
29%
24%
22%
20%
18%
18%
17%
16%
14%
Training on specific network automation tools
Cross-team training (understanding processes/tools in other IT
domains)
Data science knowledge - expertise with advanced algorithms,
data structures, data models
Training on new network infrastructure devices
Understanding of business processes outside IT
Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools
ITIL/IT best practices
Formal programming/software engineering concepts
New scripting languages/techniques (Python, etc.)
Sample Size = 239, Valid Cases = 239, Total Mentions = 427
Skill Gaps Enterprises Need to Close
© 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

24. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Closing the Skills Gap
• 37% devoting “very significant”
resources to training up network
team
• “Companies need to set aside time
to let network engineers develop
skills over time. With [network
automation] programming, you can’t
send a person to a one-week
bootcamp and turn them into a
software developer.”
 Network automation engineer, large
entertainment company
• The network team isn’t the only
one with a skills gap
• “[Management] took me, a
networking person, into a [network
automation] programming role
because there were very visible
gaps within the programming group
where they didn’t understand
networking.”
 Network automation specialist, very large
software company
Slide 24 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

25. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Questions?
Slide 25 © 2019 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
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