The Risks of Automation

Risks and challenges

There is always risk associated with making changes to the network. Despite the best designs and architectures, some changes are disruptive. Hence, outages cannot be avoided. Networks also have the largest blast radius in the enterprise. The closer to the network core changes are made, the higher the scope of the change impact. For example, an entire building can be isolated from the network if changes cause an outage at the distribution layer. If the network is down, almost every other aspect of the organization is impacted in some way. Uptime is of the utmost importance to an organization because network downtime can have a huge impact on business. These factors can lead to an extremely risk-averse view of network operations. Hence, the lesser the change, the better.

The biggest challenge in network automation is an organization’s willingness to adopt it. Despite obvious benefits, which become clear throughout this course, there can be a lot of resistance to this type of change. This is particularly regarding changes to the network. This mindset is also at odds with the modern pressures and business demands of the network to be, ironically, constantly changing. Network automation is in fact a safer and more reliable approach, partly because it simply eliminates the manual error.