Evolution of network automation to network intelligence

In the process of industrial digitalization, Internet of Things, and 5G mobile network deployment, network automation and intelligence have become crucial, but the two cannot be confused. Network automation is the foundation and prototype, and is the primary stage of future networks, while network intelligence is advancement and development, and is the advanced stage of future networks. It can be said that intelligence is an upgraded version of network automation. However, if we want to truly realize the leap from network automation to intelligence, there is obviously still a long way to go.

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Why Network Automation

Network automation refers to the process of automatically configuring, managing, testing, deploying, and operating physical and virtual devices in a network. With this technology, the network can automatically perform the tasks and functions that have been set every day. Through collaboration, automation, and network orchestration, network operations involving complex configuration and device management can be simplified to adapt to the business flexibility of the ever-changing environment.

For many enterprises, the lack of flexibility in the network has become a major bottleneck that hinders their business development, because it reduces the possibility of deploying a powerful and responsive data center infrastructure. For service providers, automation has long become a basic network strategy, because they focus on improving network flexibility and reliability, and also need to control operating expenses and capital expenditures. At this time, service providers must use automation to solve routine tasks that are time-consuming, repetitive or prone to errors to improve operational efficiency, profits and user satisfaction.

Since any network resource controlled through a command line interface or API can be automated, network automation technology can be deployed in data center networks, cloud networks, or wireless networks. In addition, as computing power costs decrease and the demand for virtual computing grows, current network automation technology has become more available to many companies.

Three reasons for the network to move towards automation

For network administrators of small and medium-sized enterprises, it may be more direct to manually configure or diagnose network tasks while managing dozens of network devices. However, for large enterprises, the number of network devices may grow exponentially, and automated configuration is obviously the key. The following three reasons are also the key to automating the network.

• First, it is to reduce human errors. According to a survey, 60% to 80% of the network failures found are caused by human errors, even if they are manually "CTRL C" and "CTRL V". More importantly, this manual process is obviously not scalable to large-scale network operation and maintenance applications.
• Secondly, make the network more suitable for IT server environments. For many years, a large number of enterprise operation and maintenance teams have been using automation to create highly dynamic server systems. Given that automation can provide the required connectivity and security in a timely manner, it also supports APIs and can achieve openness and interoperability based on standard protocols and open source automation frameworks (such as Ansible, Saltstack, Puppet, and Chef). In addition, service providers and enterprises often use these automation frameworks to accelerate their network automation migration.
• In addition, configuration efficiency is improved. Manual configuration is a one-to-one process, and the side effect is that the network configuration can only be applied to the current device. This makes it impossible to apply QoS flow control configuration operations consistently across the entire infrastructure. Fortunately, network automation can resolve this problem, making it quite simple to issue the same configuration across the entire network.