NC Nov-Dec 2021

OPINION: NETOPS
OUT OF NETOPTIONS?
ALAN STEWART BROWN, VP OF EMEA, OPENGEAR ON WHY NETOPS
AND NETWORK AUTOMATION WON’T REPLACE HUMAN EXPERTISE
The road to network resilience is a thorny
one, with networks becoming ever-more
complex and harder to manage. One
way organisations can enhance resilience is by
adopting NetOps: an approach which embeds
a growing amount of automation, virtualisation
and orchestration, to make networking
operations and functions faster and more
accessible. Research commissioned by
Opengear discovered 87% of businesses had
increased investment in NetOps in the past two
years, with a further 51% planning to implement
this functionality in the next year. But as more
businesses adopt a NetOps approach,
particularly via automated processes, the
traditional role of the network engineer has
come under scrutiny.
With the increasing popularity of NetOps and
the ability for automation to reduce human
error, is there still a place for the engineer in the
maintenance of a business network? The
answer is an unequivocal 'yes'. Rather than
removing the need for the network engineer, the
advance of NetOps and network automation
enhances the value network engineers can bring
to a business.
NO MORE HEROES?
Network engineers have historically been viewed
as the saviours when something goes wrong.
The culture around saving the day meant one
professional was relied on to step in when a
fault occurred. They were often seen as having a
level of understanding about the network that
others were unable to attain, and much of the
work involved hard manual effort and following
repetitive applications or routines.
If a particular event had happened on the
network, most companies would expect an
engineer to log in, run through five or six
routines to work out what was happening and
then remediate the problem. NetOps is
changing that culture in a positive way by
altering the entire procedure so that when such
an event happens, the system automatically
runs through those five or six steps. If that does
not resolve the problem it is escalated to the
network engineer to handle the next level of
troubleshooting.
All this removes the dependency on a single
hero to do the diagnostic and remediation
work but also enables more engineers to be
heroes by freeing them to apply their skills more
proactively in managing the network at a
higher operational level.
NEED FOR RESKILLING
Through the capabilities it delivers, NetOps is
helping overcome skills shortages for
businesses. There are simply not enough
engineers available to comprehensively staff
every network location. Businesses can use
NetOps tools to concentrate their network
team's resource at a network operations centre
effectively rather than having to find resources
to staff each and every site.
So, the advent of NetOps will bring new
opportunities to network engineers but will also
require a level of reskilling. For years the badge
of honour was being a certified engineer and
CCIE (Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert) or a
CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) or
JNCIE (Juniper). That is still valuable but for
NetOps, there is an additional skillset engineers
will need to train for. They will need to program
in Python, for example, and understand how
docker containers work. They will need to
deploy commonly-used toolsets like Chef,
Puppet and Ansible. Network engineers need to
understand how all this works - and those
businesses that understand all this are training
them up in the required skillsets.
The success of this process will require
commitment from engineers. Some will be
wary of NetOps and automation, in part due
to a lack of understanding of or familiarity with
the approach. Overcoming this will, in part,
come down to engineers being prepared to
dip their toes in the water of the new
approach. Simply using a Raspberry Pi at
home, for example, will help them to gain
experience in that environment.
For young network engineers entering the
business, collaboration with more experienced
employees will be crucial, and the onus will be
on business leaders to ensure that new starters
learn from every aspect of the organisation.
The business may also need to invest more in
training and support for their engineers. In the
Opengear survey, just 32% of respondents
said their network management/engineering
team had undertaken industry training courses
in order to transition to NetOps. More than
half (53%) of the survey sample said they had
personally learnt about it (NetOps) in their
spare time.
Providing more flexibility, increasing speed
and improving programmability, NetOps is a
proactive approach to networking that uses
automation and provisioning to modernise
networks and increase their resilience. Yet, if
enterprises are to make a success of it, they
need to transition to a NetOps culture.
Ultimately, that entails more than just
integration of new solutions; it needs a
mindset shift among the professionals that
work within it.
Enterprises and their engineers taking these
considerations into account and focusing on
achieving them will ensure effective integration
of NetOps and enable a smoother journey on
the road to resilience. NC
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