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

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

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

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...