Network Automation & Orchestration Maturity Model: How to Assess & Evolve

Overall adoption of network automation and orchestration has grown steadily in the past few years, but within and across an organization, the rate of adoption can vary greatly. Clear patterns have begun to emerge. Individuals begin with scripts to automate tasks. Those can then grow into larger automations, usually with team-wide participation, and in some cases evolve into end-to-end orchestrations and self-service. As the approach to automation evolves, its benefits can expand in scope across the organization.

Based on direct experience working with hundreds of teams and the observations of thousands of projects across the community, Itential experts have developed the Network Automation & Orchestration Maturity Model. The purpose of the model is to define consistent stages that can be used to measure progress in automation and orchestration teams and initiatives, which will help engineers and business leaders alike to maximize the impact of automation and orchestration.

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will walkthrough:

• Why maturity models matter in emerging technology areas.
• How engineers and teams can use the maturity model to improve their successes in automation.
• How business leaders can use the maturity model to measure their current capabilities and improve their long-term automation strategies.

The first step for every network team getting started with network automation is to create automations for individual activities. As network engineers start to investigate automation, their initial thoughts usually revolve around “what” tasks to automate and “how” they can automate those tasks. This is an incredibly helpful and useful first step into automation, and with the right tools and frame of reference, a lot of a network engineer’s daily backlog can be overcome. When these first steps are taken, it’s important to also find ways to effectively manage your automations and engage and collaborate with other team members around these automation assets.

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will share insights gathered from their time spent working with our customers who have implemented task-based automation successfully, including:

• Assessing use cases, automation tools, time, and skills.
• Expected benefits of implementing task-based automations.
• Required toolset capabilities to successfully manage and run your automations.
• Lessons learned from teams who have been successful with task automation.
• How Itential can help organize, share, and secure your scripts for extended use.
• The perspective of an engineer and what’s needed to evolve your task automation efforts.
• The perspective of IT leaders and what’s needed to set your team up for task automation success.

Individuals and teams that are ready to take the next step from networking and infrastructure task automation, are looking to evolve to the next phase of their network automation maturity – process orchestration. This takes automation a step further to encompass the full end-to-process surrounding networking tasks such as responding to or closing an IT ticket, performing configuration validation, and communicating with sources of truth.

However, when assessing the best route to evolve teams quickly to this next stage, they realize that the tools which enabled their success in automating tasks lack the capabilities required to orchestrate end-to-end processes at scale.

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will walkthrough:

• Why teams should consider process orchestration and the benefits it can bring.
• The challenges and opportunities involved in the transition.
• The challenges involved with moving to process orchestration from a task-based approach.
• Lessons learned by teams who have successfully transitioned to process orchestration.
• How Itential helps you evolve your automations to touch every part of the process with its patented integration capabilities.
• The perspective of an engineer and what’s needed to evolve your automation efforts to encompass end-to-end processes.
• The perspective of IT leaders and what’s needed to set your team up for process orchestration success.

For organizations ready to take the final step in their network automation journey, they’re looking to evolve from process orchestration to self-serve networking. Self-serve networking exposes the process orchestrations already built to a larger set of end users, providing capabilities like Network as a Service via APIs.

The business impact of this transition is significant. Organizations who succeed with implementing self-service can provide the best experience for end users and customers, delivering more services in less time across their complex hybrid, distributed infrastructure.

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will walkthrough:

• How the transition to self-service networking becomes a benefits force multiplier.
• The components of a self-service model and the tools and technologies that enable it.
• Lessons learned by teams who have successfully transitioned to self-service networking.
• How Itential supports self-service with its northbound API exposure capabilities.
• The perspective of an engineer and what’s needed to evolve to make your automations become self-service for end users.
• The perspective of IT leaders and what’s needed to set your team up for self-service networking success.