02 July 2020

Nearly half (48%) of senior IT decision-makers globally said that more than quarter of the outages their organisations have suffered over the past two years have been caused by changes to the network infrastructure, according to a recent survey of 500 global IT bosses. 

The study, titled ‘Measuring the True Cost of Network Outages’ and commissioned by Opengear, a Digi International company, found that almost half (44%) of survey respondents said they were ‘increasing the level of automation across the network’ to drive up network resilience within their organisation and combat these outages.

In addition, nearly 60% of the overall survey sample said their organisation had introduced a NetOps automation approach across its network operations. Significantly, 89% said that it had made that network more reliable, while just 1% overall said it had become less reliable speaking of the high-reward, low-risk nature of the approach.

Steve Cummins, vice president of marketing, Opengear, said: “With outages on the rise, and network engineers currently unable to travel to affected sites to make fixes, network automation is rapidly becoming a necessity. Being able to use standard NetOps tools such as Docker, Python and Ansible, within the network management infrastructure itself, simplifies and accelerates deployment of those automation routines. A NetOps-enabled console server can be the key to unlocking NetOps for many companies.”

In addition to increased network reliability, respondents most commonly cited enhanced security (48%), time savings (45%) and cost savings (41%) as the biggest benefits having a solution that could operate independently from the main in-band network and detect and remediate network issues automatically.