Automation and Software-Defined Networking are poised to become tomorrow’s standard for how administrators manage their networks.  Whether you’re a seasoned 20-year+ CLI warrior or a brand new college grad, you’re sure to see infrastructure-as-code in the years ahead.

Is your organization prepared to make the infrastructure-as-code transition?  Are your network and security teams sharpening their “developer” skills, or looking into third-party automation tools?  Are you developing a strategy for your infrastructure automation roadmap?

 

If you’re a small to medium-sized business; time, resource availability, and skillset depth are already constraints you’re familiar with, and there’s a good chance you have not given these questions a second thought.  You may not have the luxury of sending your small team to Python/Ansible/Chef training, or you may even be in a situation where one or two individuals hold the keys to the kingdom, and are simply set in their ways.

In the case of large businesses and enterprises, resources may not be a primary concern.  These organizations may even be large enough to have their own in-house development teams well-versed in DevOps tools, but in most cases, there is little, if any, collaboration with networking and/or security teams.  These entities face internal bureaucracy, strict compliance regulations, and stringent change-control processes that make any infrastructure changes high-stress, high-risk operations.

 

Though inherently different, these two entities benefit from the automation process in very similar ways:

Slash Delivery Times, Enhance Competitive Advantage, Increase Margin

  • Whether you’ve got a single firewall to deploy for your small, 5-man shop, or a 5000-node Kubernetes cluster for your global enterprise, infrastructure-as-code can reduce your time-to-delivery for mundane tasks or complex workflows alike.
  • Time is money.  By empowering you to DevOp-tize your workflows, your resources will deploy solutions quicker, leaner, and more accurately than ever before.  A 3-engineer, 120-man-hour work-week into a 15-minute playbook?  We’ve helped our customers realize this potential.

Reduce Resource Overhead

  • Free-up valuable resources for critical tasks that require hands-on attention or direct interaction.
  • Less is more!  With the right playbooks, your organization can minimize the resource-count and man-hours necessary to accomplish your goal.

Eliminate Human-Error

  • Code doesn’t make mistakes, humans do.  Infrastructure automation produces the same result, every time… if there’s a human capable of such a feat, we would love to meet them.
  • Predictable, reliable, repeatable workflows.  No matter who runs the task, your code does the heavy-lifting.  From a Sr. Architect to the janitor; your workflow will deliver the same, expected results.
  • Complete confidence during maintenance windows is a rare commodity.  Know you every eventuality covered with comprehensive dev-test processes and CICD pipelines to test, verify, and prove your solution beyond any doubt.