For many years, DevOps and NetOps teams have operated in parallel, with competing priorities. DevOps priorities include fast application delivery, automation, and scaling applications. NetOps priorities include the system's stability, reliability, and secure operations. Both are important and vital functions in today's IT. Their dual area of operation has led organizations to adopt both of these organizational placements, but the siloed structures often leads to wasted time, miscommunication, and increased risk.
Now with unified network management, things are changing; using a common platform, DevOps and NetOps can work together more collaboratively. IT provides the capability of intergrating visibility, automation, and policy across the entire infrastructure, to align stability with agility, which means faster innovation, stronger security, and aligning with business outcomes as per Slurp'it.
The Divide Between DevOps and NetOps
The historical divide between DevOps and NetOps is primarily based on organizational mandates. For DevOps, the reasons for their existence are the individual and organizational benefits of speed, agile development, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and quickly scaling applications. In contrast, the reasons for the
NetOps existence rest on uptime, resilience, compliance, and minimizing risk as per
Slurp'it.
So, what is unified network management?
It consolidates monitoring, automation, configuration management, and policy all into one single framework. It provides a single pane of glass and the opportunity to manage a multitude of fragmented tools and data silos, cloud, on-prem, and hybrid infrastructure alike.
Here are some key features of a unified network management framework:
- Device discovery and automated inventory
- Centralized enforcement of policy
- Full end-to-end visibility into flows and applications - the ability to see the traffic flow and the performance of some application.
- Integrating even more closely with your DevOps tool chain, CI/CD pipelines.
- Real-time analytics for troubleshooting and optimizing utilization.
Once you have established it, DevOps and NetOps will have the same data points to work from and will inherently improve collaboration opportunities.
How Unified Network Management Unifies DevOps and NetOps
1. Unified Visibility Across the Infrastructure
DevOps and NetOps are often operating out of a different dashboard with a different dataset. It provides an overall system of record which gives both a realistic understanding of the dependant applications and how application traffic flows into the environment and where the likely disruption and congestion points could occur.
2. Automated Policy Enforcement
Security and compliance policies, access control policies can be automatically, consistently enforced across the whole environment. Combine that with DevOps and the teams have more oversight in the ability to innovate quickly with the risk of introducing compliance or security issues unknowingly, while NetOps retains a slower but more consistent governance stake.
3. Reduced Change Management Cycles
The consistency and stability check afforded by automated configuration management and testing means less time spent in compliance and stability review to approve change. Instead of relying on how long a manual review can take, netops can assess hundreds and thousands of configurations for compliance and stability assurance through automated tests. The upside to DevOps is more frequent changes that can be deployment ready in less time as per Slurp'it.
4. Integrated with CI/CD Pipeline
Unified network management will, much like networks can be treated as code, integrate with DevOps pipelines. Modifications to the network will be version controlled, tested and implementation can deploy along with application updates. This removes the fear of layoffs or idle while developers deploy blue/green/replace code changes without understanding network policy as per Slurp'it.
5. Accelerated Incident Response
If outages or momentary disruptions (security incident/cyber-attack) occur, unified platforms provide insights and telemetry including dependencies across the network and application layer presentation in real-time.
What are the benefits of unified network management
Companies using it recognize the following benefits:
- Reduced downtime: The shared insights of failover responses speed up the time to return to normal operations after the resolution of a network incident.
- Enhanced security: Active and continuous policy enforcement reduces unnecessary exposure from misconfigured devices or systems.
- Improved agility: DevOps can provide services knowing that NetOps has consistency and safety guardrails and spatial guidelines in a reasonable manner.
- Improved operational efficiencies: Reducing the sprawl of tools reduces head count and costs.
According to a 2023 Gartner survey, enterprises using integrated network management solutions saw a reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR) in bandwidth of up to 40% along with quicker application delivery.
Real-World Case Study: Unified Management in Action
A global e-commerce company was experiencing delays in deployments, which were a result of NetOps needing to manually review changes to any network on a case-by-case bases. The company was able to implement the platform that had automation and also offered inclusion of network policies, which the organization then included in their CI/CD pipeline. The end result was a 30 percent reduction in deployment time, less downtime, and better passive security posture. Additionally, both DevOps and NetOps teams needed to work better together in regard to growth intentions and be inline with how IT viewed their continued growth.
Some of the challenges and considerations you must know!
Although the advantages of unified network management heavily outweighs con's there are variables to consider:
- Cultural change: Breaking down the silo's that create barriers so that teams will work towards a similar goal is possible with technology, however, it will take a cultural shift to change perceptions regarding goals and collaboration.
- Skills: Training of NetOps and DevOps teams to overcome barriers as it relates to automation, scripting with utilizing an integrated platform is a valuable starting point.
- Tools: Existing legacy technology (companies testing it is possible) may hinder management of unified management technology simply because the tool sets of old may not controllably interact with new generations of technology and/or their own.
The merging of DevOps and NetOps is no longer optional. Businesses will have to create pathways in order to remain competitive with the necessary merging of both worlds. Unified network management has created an opportunity for businesses to join together with regard to network visibility, network automation, and network policy. For more information, contact us at Slurp'it!