Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 22 | Page 21

LATEST INTELLIGENCE adopted DevOps methodologies for at least some of their development activities within the next 12 months. Early DevOps initiatives have focused on the integration of development, testing and computing infrastructure provisioning to increase developer productivity and speed applications to market. As more and more organisations move towards using DevOps- driven workflows to support production applications, the impact on network operations is significant. Specifically, network operations teams need to rapidly configure, scale, secure and integrate network infrastructure and Layer 4–7 application services. They must anticipate and respond to dynamic, ever changing workload requirements for flexible capacity, application security, load balancing and multi-cloud integrations. In short, the network team needs to be as agile and flexible as the applications team and be fully empowered to drive network agility. Network operations teams need the same level of reusable, scalable and software-defined automation to control network resources as systems and cloud administrators have over computing and storage assets. Modern, open-source-driven automation-as-code solutions provide proven technology to accelerate the transformation of network operations using automation to support digital initiatives and DevOps priorities. At F5 and Red Hat, we were curious about the state of network automation and co-sponsored a survey of more than 400 IT DevOps and NetOps professionals to explore the topic. Our findings identify opportunities where NetOps teams can learn from DevOps best practices, integrate with continuous deployment toolchains and take advantage of modern, open-source- driven automation technologies to create a more agile, business-centric value for tomorrow’s networks. n Download whitepapers free from www.intelligentcio.com/me/whitepapers/ www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 21