Skip to main content

Embracing Automation to Prevent Network Downtime

Craig McDonald
BackBox

According to Gartner, IT system downtime causes an average loss of $300,000 per hour. Unfortunately, even highly skilled IT teams can make configuration mistakes or other errors, especially when dealing with the disarray that comes along with having a plethora of different device types and vendors across hybrid cloud and on-premises environments that compile today's modern networks and support mission-critical applications.

Networks need to be up and running for businesses to continue operating and sustaining customer-facing services. Streamlining and automating network administration tasks enable routine business processes to continue without disruption, eliminating any network downtime caused by human error or other system flaws.

Causes for Downtime

While network downtime can be caused by many factors from manual configuration errors to cyberattacks from threat actors, the bottom line is that outages are frustrating for teams unable to do their daily tasks and can lead to loss of confidence from customers and partners — not to mention the potential for significant revenue loss. Organizations dealing with today’s complicated network environments should be aware of a few leading causes of outages:

1. Increasing Complexity: The sharp increase in a distributed workforce spurred by the pandemic has led to an increase in network complexity. Because organizations' employees are now often based all over the world, there is an increase in hybrid network environments and the diversity of device types as well as different vendors of those devices that compile a network, which only grows increasingly complex as a business scales.

2. Human Error: The ongoing skills gap in the IT industry has a significant impact on network outages. As companies look to fill open roles for their IT teams, IT teams struggle with endless manual tasks they are expected to do at all hours of the day. So many manual processes coupled with smaller teams means configuration errors are easily introduced, patch management falls behind and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with best practices for routine network backups. Additionally, the manual effort surrounding script maintenance could be disrupted if the resources with relevant scripting knowledge leave the organization. Backfilling for these skills can take months, leaving the network vulnerable and putting the organization in a more difficult position to restore the network when an outage does occur.

Cyberattacks: Cyberattacks that leverage network vulnerabilities can cause significant downtime for businesses, with the outages following a ransomware attack averaging about 23 days. Cyber threats like ransomware, phishing and denial of service attacks are designed to push networks offline, taking down mission-critical applications. Some attackers even deliberately delete or compromise backups in an attempt to make it even more difficult for victims to recover and increase the chances of paying a ransom.

Leveraging Network Automation to Reduce Outages

As networks grow in complexity, the demand on networks and the IT teams supporting them to consistently deliver services and maintain a secure posture increases significantly. Organizations must lean on network management strategies that rely heavily on automation to reduce outages and risk.

Automation brings the ability to instill repeatability and consistency across your team and network. With standard processes implemented throughout the network, complex tasks become near-effortless, and potentially troublesome situations within the network infrastructure are avoided. For example, updating all devices to the most current vendor operating systems is a time-consuming and error-prone process when done manually, but is critically important to ensure network security, making it the perfect process to automate.

Automation helps to mitigate the impact of turnover and ongoing skills shortages and enables staff to execute consistently and effectively regardless of seniority or experience. In addition, through automation, IT staff can spend more time on strategic, growth-focused activities instead of administrative work like updating configurations with manual and laborious scripts.

By leveraging automation to reduce the chances of human error in networks, organizations can ensure the dissemination of baseline, gold-standard configurations that will enable teams to securely configure critical devices and remediate even the slightest deviations in configurations that could create a vulnerability and lead to a cyberattack.

With so many of today’s businesses depending on functioning networks to run operations, it is critical for organizations to invest in tools that prevent network outages and the consequences that follow, and automation is key. Having a network automation strategy will drive compelling operational efficiency gains and ensure a better security posture, all while making the life of IT teams easier by ensuring networks outages do not occur.

Craig McDonald is VP of Product Management at BackBox

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Embracing Automation to Prevent Network Downtime

Craig McDonald
BackBox

According to Gartner, IT system downtime causes an average loss of $300,000 per hour. Unfortunately, even highly skilled IT teams can make configuration mistakes or other errors, especially when dealing with the disarray that comes along with having a plethora of different device types and vendors across hybrid cloud and on-premises environments that compile today's modern networks and support mission-critical applications.

Networks need to be up and running for businesses to continue operating and sustaining customer-facing services. Streamlining and automating network administration tasks enable routine business processes to continue without disruption, eliminating any network downtime caused by human error or other system flaws.

Causes for Downtime

While network downtime can be caused by many factors from manual configuration errors to cyberattacks from threat actors, the bottom line is that outages are frustrating for teams unable to do their daily tasks and can lead to loss of confidence from customers and partners — not to mention the potential for significant revenue loss. Organizations dealing with today’s complicated network environments should be aware of a few leading causes of outages:

1. Increasing Complexity: The sharp increase in a distributed workforce spurred by the pandemic has led to an increase in network complexity. Because organizations' employees are now often based all over the world, there is an increase in hybrid network environments and the diversity of device types as well as different vendors of those devices that compile a network, which only grows increasingly complex as a business scales.

2. Human Error: The ongoing skills gap in the IT industry has a significant impact on network outages. As companies look to fill open roles for their IT teams, IT teams struggle with endless manual tasks they are expected to do at all hours of the day. So many manual processes coupled with smaller teams means configuration errors are easily introduced, patch management falls behind and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with best practices for routine network backups. Additionally, the manual effort surrounding script maintenance could be disrupted if the resources with relevant scripting knowledge leave the organization. Backfilling for these skills can take months, leaving the network vulnerable and putting the organization in a more difficult position to restore the network when an outage does occur.

Cyberattacks: Cyberattacks that leverage network vulnerabilities can cause significant downtime for businesses, with the outages following a ransomware attack averaging about 23 days. Cyber threats like ransomware, phishing and denial of service attacks are designed to push networks offline, taking down mission-critical applications. Some attackers even deliberately delete or compromise backups in an attempt to make it even more difficult for victims to recover and increase the chances of paying a ransom.

Leveraging Network Automation to Reduce Outages

As networks grow in complexity, the demand on networks and the IT teams supporting them to consistently deliver services and maintain a secure posture increases significantly. Organizations must lean on network management strategies that rely heavily on automation to reduce outages and risk.

Automation brings the ability to instill repeatability and consistency across your team and network. With standard processes implemented throughout the network, complex tasks become near-effortless, and potentially troublesome situations within the network infrastructure are avoided. For example, updating all devices to the most current vendor operating systems is a time-consuming and error-prone process when done manually, but is critically important to ensure network security, making it the perfect process to automate.

Automation helps to mitigate the impact of turnover and ongoing skills shortages and enables staff to execute consistently and effectively regardless of seniority or experience. In addition, through automation, IT staff can spend more time on strategic, growth-focused activities instead of administrative work like updating configurations with manual and laborious scripts.

By leveraging automation to reduce the chances of human error in networks, organizations can ensure the dissemination of baseline, gold-standard configurations that will enable teams to securely configure critical devices and remediate even the slightest deviations in configurations that could create a vulnerability and lead to a cyberattack.

With so many of today’s businesses depending on functioning networks to run operations, it is critical for organizations to invest in tools that prevent network outages and the consequences that follow, and automation is key. Having a network automation strategy will drive compelling operational efficiency gains and ensure a better security posture, all while making the life of IT teams easier by ensuring networks outages do not occur.

Craig McDonald is VP of Product Management at BackBox

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...