The Substitution Decision: How Agentic NetOps Changes What You Need From Your Network Team
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Modern networks are under unprecedented pressure to deliver agility, security, and operational efficiency. For network leaders, traditional manual approaches can’t keep up with the pace of change or the complexity of today’s hybrid environments. Enter NetDevOps — by applying DevOps principles to network operations, organizations can automate, orchestrate, and secure their networks at scale.
Learn what NetDevOps is, why it matters, and how to assess and accelerate your organization’s network automation journey.
What Is NetDevOps?
NetDevOps is the application of DevOps principles — automation, collaboration and continuous delivery — to network operations. Traditional network automation often relies on isolated scripts or manual processes. NetDevOps treats the network as code, allowing rapid, reliable, and repeatable changes. This approach is essential for keeping pace with today’s dynamic, application-centric environments.
Why NetOps Is Embracing NetDevOps
Modern network operations teams (NetOps) are under pressure as enterprise networks become more complex, dynamic, and business-critical. Several trends are driving the need for a new approach.
Configuration and Change Management Errors
Over 80% of network problems stem from improper configuration and change management. This high error rate is a direct result of:
- Software-defined networking (SDN): SDN introduces programmable, policy-driven control, but also adds layers of abstraction and complexity that are difficult to manage manually.
- Cloud adoption: As organizations migrate workloads to public, private, and hybrid clouds, network teams are managing connectivity, security, and performance across environments.
- Multi-vendor infrastructures: Enterprise networks include equipment and software from many vendors, each with its own configuration standards, tools, and update cycles. This increases the risk of misconfigurations and makes end-to-end visibility challenging.
Accelerating Pace of Change
Lack of time to test network component updates: As network vendors adopt agile development processes, new versions of operating systems and applications are being delivered at a much-increased pace compared to several years ago. Most IT organizations cannot completely test one version before the next version arrives. This creates risks:
- Unpatched vulnerabilities: Delays in applying updates can leave critical systems exposed to security threats.
- Service disruption: Insufficient testing of changes can result in outages or degraded performance, which can impact business operations.
- Resource constraints: Network teams are often stretched thin, lacking the time and tools to keep up with the pace of change.
Manual Processes Can’t Scale
Networks are becoming more dynamic, and traditional, manual approaches to network management — like CLI-based configuration, spreadsheet tracking, and ad hoc troubleshooting — are no longer sustainable. Challenges include:
- Speed of change: Modern networks demand frequent, incremental changes to support new applications, users, and business initiatives.
- Complexity: Hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, microservices, and IoT devices all add to the operational burden.
- Lack of end-to-end visibility: Manual processes make it hard to maintain a real-time, holistic view of network health, compliance, and performance.
NetDevOps meets these challenges by automating change management, improving visibility, and supporting continuous validation.
Key Principles and Best Practices of NetDevOps
NetDevOps is built on a foundation of modern IT principles that reimagine how networks are managed, automated, and aligned with business objectives. The following pillars are essential for any organization that wants to modernize its network operations:
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Infrastructure as code is a DevOps concept for managing and provisioning infrastructure with automation to increase repeatability in operations for network administration and management. This enables quicker changes and lowers risk in change cycles with a better understanding of good and known states and configurations.
This approach has several advantages:
- Repeatability and consistency: By automating network infrastructure, IaC means that every deployment is consistent and repeatable, reducing the risk of human error.
- Speed and agility: Changes can be made quickly and safely, allowing IT teams to deploy new systems and applications without affecting existing services.
- Single source of truth: IaC tools create a documented, auditable baseline for configuration, design, security, and quality. A Network Source of Truth (NSoT) serves as a centralized, authoritative repository of network data that is the foundation for all network automation efforts.
- Business alignment: NetOps can use IaC to support business initiatives without slowing down application engineers or the line of business.
No-Code/Low-Code Automation
To automate network management, IaC leverages no-code and low-code automation and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and application programming interface (API) programmability to streamline network workflows, including change management. No-code and low-code automation platforms democratize network automation by making it accessible to a broader range of users, not only those with advanced scripting skills. Benefits include:
- Lower reliance on scripting: Platforms use visual interfaces, drag-and-drop workflows, and pre-built templates so network teams can automate complex tasks without writing code.
- Speedier adoption: When technical barriers are lowered, organizations can speed up the adoption of automation and empower more team members to contribute to operational improvements.
- Streamlined workflows: No-code tools can integrate with APIs and support JSON-based programmability. This results in the seamless automation of change management, monitoring, and troubleshooting.
Intent-Based Networking (IBN)
Intent-based networking takes automation a step further by allowing organizations to define the intent of the network. The system then continuously validates and enforces this state and aligns with business requirements. Key aspects include:
- Continuous validation: The network is constantly measured, tested, and monitored so it matches the defined intent and supports optimal service and application delivery.
- Automated remediation: If the network strays from its intended state, automation can trigger corrective actions. This reduces downtime and manual intervention.
- Alignment with business goals: IBN means network operations are always in sync with business needs, compliance requirements, and security policies.
Benefits of NetDevOps
Reducing risk in application management while streamlining performance and delivery requires a cultural shift in operations to embrace the goals and reap the benefits of automation.
Automate Change Management Workflows
One of the common goals of NetDevOps is bringing new services and offerings rapidly to market. As operational teams work together to advance this goal through NetDevOps, they can benefit from more streamlined workflows, including change management. Network automation creates predictable, protected, and defendable change.
Through understanding of the network’s state, condition, topology, and performance, automation can build in validation network checks to ensure application flows are preserved and maintained across the network.
Repeatable Automation
Businesses need to craft a more intelligent, repeatable, and scalable operational approach that is tightly alig ned with their needs. No-code intent-based network automation addresses this by improving service availability while significantly reducing business risk, operational costs, outages, and escalations.
Democratizing existing subject matter expertise in NetOps along with a live digital twin of the entire hybrid network makes it easier to quickly adopt and benefit from automation. Platforms can also capture troubleshooting steps and make those resolutions repeatable and shareable across any organization without coding or developers.
Scalability and Agility
Developer-dependent, script-heavy approaches are no longer agile enough to scale with business needs. Automation scales network operations much more efficiently by leveraging programmable replication of intents.
Looking at automation as scalable units in a modular system is a more logical way to structure operational needs for scale. This can be achieved readily by building template-based automation units and replicating them on demand across all devices that meet specific criteria in any hybrid multi-vendor network.
Ready to Transform Your Network Operations?
NetBrain can help you automate, secure, and future-proof your network — without the complexity. A few key advantages of our solution include:
- 24/7 proactive assessments
- Change impact analysis at every stage
- User-friendly interface — no complex coding required
- Complete automation
- Easy reporting for better data insights
- Better digital asset management
To see how NetBrain can improve your workflows, reach out today to schedule a demo!
