Network automation for everyone

Networking is a critical component of both IT and operational technology (OT), supporting hybrid cloud applications, remote workforces, and edge deployments. However, while infrastructure has evolved rapidly, network management often lags behind. Many organizations still rely on a fragmented mix of custom automation scripts, single-function tools, and manual processes. This approach presents several challenges: 

• Fragmented expertise: Network operations (NetOps) teams often specialize in isolated domains, limiting cross-team productivity.
• Isolated team structures: Disparate departments struggle to coordinate workflows.
• Legacy constraints: Traditional operational practices are difficult to modernize without a platform that supports the entire lifecycle of the network.
• Complicated security landscape: An increasing volume of threats can overwhelm teams that lack automated, policy-driven responses, making security and compliance across multivendor environments more difficult.
• Vendor-centric management: Many vendors focus on individual product features rather than holistic operational improvements and interoperability. 

NetOps teams are able to overcome these challenges with strategic automation. As organizations adopt artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), the programmable foundation provided by network automation serves as an essential governance layer. It provides the deterministic execution required to turn insights into trusted, reliable action. Additionally, NetOps teams can collaborate more effectively through increased transparency of cross-functional initiatives that support business transformation and modernization.

Strategic automation helps you accelerate network operations 

IT organizations must adapt to rapidly shifting application and developer requirements. Traditional, manual approaches to network configuration are too slow to support these needs, making it difficult to:

• Provide a high level of service to users.
• Deliver resources to application development and IT operations teams on demand.
• Implement consistent change control and configuration processes.
• Manage inventory and maintain configuration standards across disparate platforms.
• Build proactive, self-sufficient NetOps teams and NetSecOps practices.

While programmable, software-based technologies support digital initiatives, NetOps teams often struggle to reach the same automation maturity as IT teams. Many only automate specific tasks in a limited capacity, creating hybrid processes that require manual intervention. This often happens because:

• Device-specific tools are often difficult to incorporate into end-to-end automation processes.
• Integrating automation across multivendor environments can be difficult.
• Teams can perceive automation as a loss of control or an increased operational risk.
• NetOps professionals can feel they lack the specific skills to use new automation technologies.

Embracing end-to-end automation can help you overcome these challenges to adopt agile NetSecOps approaches and deliver high-value network services on demand. The possibilities offered by network automation are expansive. You can automate Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 operations, and even respond to changing conditions in your network and IT environment without human intervention.

For example, when a security incident is detected, the platform can automatically shut down affected ports, quarantine components, and generate a service ticket for IT. You can also use automation to gather facts for troubleshooting, identifying and remediating issues before they affect users–preventing outages and making sure teams no longer suffer from work that is led by interruptions.

Network automation helps make teams more productive and operations more consistent, so your organization can focus on its highest priorities.

Network automation uses programmable logic to manage resources and services, allowing NetOps teams to rapidly configure, scale, harden, and integrate network infrastructure (layers 1-3) and application services (layers 4-7). While telecommunications and cloud providers were early adopters, many organizations now use network automation to accelerate growth across their already fast-growing environments.

With network automation, NetOps teams can respond quickly to changing workload requirements for flexible capacity, application security, load balancing, and hybrid cloud integrations. Network automation helps enable:

• Productivity: Teams use self-service, on-demand network activities that satisfy corporate security policies without manual bottlenecks.
• Operational transparency: Improvements to change management, documentation, and logging increase visibility across the datacenter and edge networks.
• Resilient operations: Event-driven approaches automatically respond to changes in your network or IT environment. 

Together, these improvements provide NetOps teams with a programmable foundation, built on network automation, that serves as an essential governance layer across the organization. 

Why automate your network?

Network automation benefits organizations of varying sizes, across industries.

Reusable, scalable, and software-defined automation gives you greater control and visibility across your infrastructure. The result is improved uptime, staff productivity, and hardened security.

As a foundation for building and operating automation at scale, Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform allows you to create and orchestrate complete IT workflows that support your business goals. Multiple domain teams can use the platform to build, scale, and deploy automation across the entire organization while maintaining strict governance controls.

Ansible Automation Platform orchestrates every aspect of your IT environment—from servers and networks to applications, security, and DevOps. It supports both standalone and devices controlled through software-defined networking (SDN) across multivendor virtual, physical, and cloud environments so you can automate your entire infrastructure using a single, unified platform.

Using a common language, Ansible Automation Platform makes everyday tasks repeatable and scalable so you can run your network more efficiently. Choose to automate where you need it most. The platform’s flexible framework embraces incremental change, so you can start small and expand over time.

With Ansible Automation Platform, you can automate everything from individual network tasks (like device configuration updates), to complex processes that involve multiple network teams, to entire workflows that cross IT domains. For example, you can use Ansible Automation Platform to manage the lifecycles of cloud-native applications, including the underlying virtual machines (VMs), network connectivity, access management, and other dependencies.

Network management efficiencies by responsibility

Simple

Ansible Automation Platform uses human-readable automation through YAML-based playbooks, roles, and rulebooks. Tasks are executed in order and can be combined to orchestrate complex processes. Users can create effective automation sequences through a visual user interface (UI). Because no special programming skills are required, NetOps engineers can use the platform immediately.

Powerful

The platform acts as a sophisticated abstraction layer for your entire IT environment. By using modules and plugins, it transfers instructions over existing transport mechanisms and provides templating engines for large-scale automation. Use certified and validated automation content from our network partner ecosystem helps you create reliable enterprise workflows. Command line interfaces (CLIs) and application programming interfaces (APIs) can also be accessed directly within the platform, so you can implement network configurations as code while the platform translates commands for each endpoint.

Modern IT environments are complex, often spanning multiple vendors and technologies. Networking is critical to this mix and must be integrated across multivendor stacks to ensure reliable, security-focused connections. Red Hat believes that vendor collaboration through open ecosystems is essential for building the resilient operations customers need to meet their unique business goals.

Certified and validated content

Ansible Content Collections offer more than 180 prebuilt modules and roles from industry-leading partners, including a broad selection of network vendors and technologies. Red Hat Ansible Certified Content jumpstarts integration with partner platforms, while Ansible validated content provides a tested, opinionated path for performing complex operational tasks. 

From community innovations to a commercial-grade product

Ansible Automation Platform is a fully supported product that incorporates the innovation of open source projects while mitigating enterprise risk. Our open development model frees your staff from managing, updating, and testing community releases—saving time and increasing productivity. The platform also delivers essential enterprise security capabilities like role-based access control (RBAC), auditing, logging, and integration with authentication systems.

Comprehensive support 

Red Hat offers holistic, end-to-end support—from operating system (OS) to automation software to dozens of certified vendor integrations. Every Red Hat subscription provides access to technical experts to help you build and manage your solutions. Our collaborative approach gives you access to the latest product knowledge and best practices. Security patches and updates are regularly provided by the Red Hat Global Support Services team.

Expertise to empower your staff

Red Hat provides expert services and training to help you on your path to network automation:

• Red Hat Consulting: Works with your team to analyze challenges and design cost-effective, comprehensive solutions.
• Red Hat Training and Certification: Offers hands-on training and practical certifications to help your staff apply best practices and improve overall productivity.

Choice and flexibility for your network

Red Hat fosters a large ecosystem of certified partners, ensuring you can deploy your preferred tools, clouds, and hardware with confidence. Ansible Automation Platform includes network-specific Ansible Content Collections that allow you to automate devices from a vast range of vendors.

Because the platform works across networks and tools, you can orchestrate complete workflows that incorporate your current technologies—such as switches, routers, firewalls, access points, and load balancers—as well as those you plan to adopt in the future. This flexibility ensures you can manage the entire lifecycle of your infrastructure.

Automating network operations for TDBank 

TD Bank offers a full range of financial products and services to over 27.5 million customers worldwide. Through their network transformation roadmap, the bank sought to lead with an automation-first mindset at the center of its platform delivery capabilities, ranging from scalability of software upgrades, configuration management and deployment, and standing up new products. The internal evolution of their automation capabilities drove forward the reduction of repetitive tasks for engineering teams alongside bringing new standardization to their deployments.

• Maintained access controls across firewall, load balancer, and switching teams for playbook execution, while fostering cross team-collaboration on workflows.
• Automated the standardization of more than 10,000 network devices against new-state standards, improving software deployment and compliance, as well as configuration management.
• Automated upgrade of more than 8,500 Cisco devices over the span of 8 months.

Read the success story³

Automation Unlocks 5G Potential at One New Zealand

One New Zealand (formerly Vodafone NZ), a leading telecommunications and digital services provider, needed to simplify its complex network operations to support the rollout of 5G and manage increasing traffic demands. The company uses Ansible Automation Platform to move from manual, per-node configurations to a unified automation framework that spans its core network and datacenter environments.

• 40x improvement in upgrade times for a single virtual network function (VNF).
• Reduced provisioning time from 10 days to a single day.
• Automated version control and rollback functionality critical for 5G networks.

Read the blog post⁴

The State of Missouri Scales Automation, Unlocking Time for Innovation

The State of Missouri’s Office of Administration, Information Technology Services Division (ITSD), needed to overcome manual, siloed processes to better serve its 6 million citizens. The state uses Ansible Automation Platform to consolidate disparate tools into a unified automation strategy, streamlining the management of thousands of servers across its diverse agencies.

• Automated 28,000 tasks to significantly reduce manual workloads.
• Saved 22,000 labor hours annually for IT staff.
• Improved consistency and speed of service delivery for Missouri citizens.

Read the blog post⁵

Red Hat can help you define your path to efficiency

Network automation is essential for supporting the evolving application and workload requirements of modern digital business. Ansible Automation Platform provides a clear path to modernizing your network operations while maintaining support for your current processes and existing infrastructure.

While transitioning to a fully automated network can seem intimidating, we recommend starting small and making incremental changes at your own pace. Focus on solving the contained, tactical problems your team faces daily, and build the foundation from there.

It’s easy to get started

• Gain visibility: Create playbooks that perform low-risk read-only tasks to verify information and validate network state across the datacenter and edge networks.
• Automate toil: Build simple jobs to replace tedious, unpopular, and manual tasks.
• Bridge the skills gap: Use the platform’s human-readable YAML to apply your team’s current domain expertise to automation without requiring complex programming skills.

As you expand these efforts, you will organically create the governance and trust layer necessary for future AIOps initiatives and ensure your organization can better manage modernizing its infrastructure with confidence and scale. Remember, automation is more than a tool—it’s a journey, a culture, and a strategy.

Ready to start automating your networks?

Network automation provides the governance layer that streamlines operations, decreases response times, and supports modern business demands. 

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform gives your organization everything it needs to automate its IT network and cloud environment at scale. With flexible, user-friendly automation, you can define a simple, powerful path to network efficiency without leaving your organization’s existing processes and infrastructure behind. 

Get started with your Ansible Automation Platform trial

Learn more at ansible.com/network-automation