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Unlock the Power of Real-Time Collaboration and Network Automation

Rich Martin
Itential

Online collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams have become indispensable tools for millions of people around the world, giving businesses and their employees the ability to connect with colleagues and team members directly, and to interact with them in real time. These platforms not only help reduce emails and meetings, they also increase work efficiency and improve a team's overall effectiveness.

But when you look beyond the basic messaging capabilities and other functionalities of these platforms, there is a more powerful collaboration tool that many teams or organizations have yet to tap into.

In the network engineering world, for example, many teams have yet to realize the immense benefit one of these real-time collaboration tools can bring to a successful automation strategy. By integrating a collaboration platform into a network automation strategy — and taking advantage of being able to share responses, files, videos and even links to applications and device statuses — network teams can leverage these tools to manage, monitor and update their networks in real time, and improve the ways in which they manage their networks.

Integrate and Automate

For teams managing large networks, communication between network engineers, network operations, and management is critical for broadcasting changes in network status, coordinating resources, and resolving disruptions.

Many network teams already use a collaboration platform for their day-to-day communications. However, when it's time to communicate detailed network information in real time, the platform often becomes an afterthought, especially when it comes to making changes during a short maintenance window or troubleshooting a network problem. These teams are missing an opportunity to employ a tool they're already using to its full potential.

Integrating a collaboration tool into your network automations can generate three key benefits:

1. Real-time automation visibility

Remember what it was like to have to manually work through backlogs of network changes?

Now that more teams are leveraging automation, tasks that took hours or even days can be accomplished in minutes. That's obviously a good thing from a productivity standpoint, but it also makes keeping everyone on the team aware of when automations are running and what changes were made more difficult.

By integrating a collaboration platform into the automated network change process, teams can receive real-time updates as tasks are executed within the workflow, providing better visibility and oversight of those automated changes and the overall well-being of the network.

2. Increased process efficiency and accountability

To provision a new application or service, teams need to coordinate efforts and work in a specific order, each one doing its part and communicating details that are necessary for everything to work correctly. Unfortunately, it's common for delays to occur due to a lack of communication between teams, or a miscommunication or non-communication of the network details that another group needs to do its part of the process.

The most commonly used collaboration tools offer that the ability to integrate easily with automation processes to send messages, files, and links to individuals and channels. By updating the platform with an automation as soon as a task is completed, it can notify the next team so they're aware and can start their portion of the process. The notification could even include a direct HTTPS link to a change ticket or device entry, saving teams the time of looking up data based on just a text. This will speed handoffs between teams and reduce errors, as well as improve accountability across the organization.

3. Faster trouble resolution

Networks have become complex systems that span multiple devices across multiple domains, working together through many different protocols. In any kind of dispersed system like this there's always the opportunity for problems to rear their ugly heads, and networks are no exception.

Fortunately, networks have many ways to provide resiliency and redundancy at multiple layers, so the impact of a problem can be minimized. However, if you want to help network teams resolve problems quickly, they need to all be aware of the issue in real-time and have immediate access to the information leading up to the problem. Network automations that integrate with a collaboration platform for updates and notifications can see a full accounting of what happened and when during a network event, reducing the time to resolve network problems when they occur.

Take Collaboration to the Next Level

If you can automate your network, you can very likely also automate the ways you keep your teams up to date on its status. By integrating collaboration tools into your network automation workflow, you can extract and format data within the automation and send out real-time messages to communicate and keep the entire team updated on the status of the network and any changes being implemented.

To take full advantage of these capabilities, the automation platform you use should offer the ability to easily create automations that can gather data for a network change, execute the network change, and broadcast a message to a team with detailed information on the network devices being changed, the nature of the changes, and when the changes begin and are completed — all while the automation is in execution. This eliminates the need for network engineers to stop the work they're doing to manually post an update so they can focus on getting more work done.

Integrating a collaboration platform into your network automation process can pay multiple dividends in the managing, monitoring and updating of your network. By dynamically querying devices, extracting data, and broadcasting status updates to your network teams, real-time insight into your network is just a click away.

Rich Martin is Director of Technical Marketing at Itential

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Unlock the Power of Real-Time Collaboration and Network Automation

Rich Martin
Itential

Online collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams have become indispensable tools for millions of people around the world, giving businesses and their employees the ability to connect with colleagues and team members directly, and to interact with them in real time. These platforms not only help reduce emails and meetings, they also increase work efficiency and improve a team's overall effectiveness.

But when you look beyond the basic messaging capabilities and other functionalities of these platforms, there is a more powerful collaboration tool that many teams or organizations have yet to tap into.

In the network engineering world, for example, many teams have yet to realize the immense benefit one of these real-time collaboration tools can bring to a successful automation strategy. By integrating a collaboration platform into a network automation strategy — and taking advantage of being able to share responses, files, videos and even links to applications and device statuses — network teams can leverage these tools to manage, monitor and update their networks in real time, and improve the ways in which they manage their networks.

Integrate and Automate

For teams managing large networks, communication between network engineers, network operations, and management is critical for broadcasting changes in network status, coordinating resources, and resolving disruptions.

Many network teams already use a collaboration platform for their day-to-day communications. However, when it's time to communicate detailed network information in real time, the platform often becomes an afterthought, especially when it comes to making changes during a short maintenance window or troubleshooting a network problem. These teams are missing an opportunity to employ a tool they're already using to its full potential.

Integrating a collaboration tool into your network automations can generate three key benefits:

1. Real-time automation visibility

Remember what it was like to have to manually work through backlogs of network changes?

Now that more teams are leveraging automation, tasks that took hours or even days can be accomplished in minutes. That's obviously a good thing from a productivity standpoint, but it also makes keeping everyone on the team aware of when automations are running and what changes were made more difficult.

By integrating a collaboration platform into the automated network change process, teams can receive real-time updates as tasks are executed within the workflow, providing better visibility and oversight of those automated changes and the overall well-being of the network.

2. Increased process efficiency and accountability

To provision a new application or service, teams need to coordinate efforts and work in a specific order, each one doing its part and communicating details that are necessary for everything to work correctly. Unfortunately, it's common for delays to occur due to a lack of communication between teams, or a miscommunication or non-communication of the network details that another group needs to do its part of the process.

The most commonly used collaboration tools offer that the ability to integrate easily with automation processes to send messages, files, and links to individuals and channels. By updating the platform with an automation as soon as a task is completed, it can notify the next team so they're aware and can start their portion of the process. The notification could even include a direct HTTPS link to a change ticket or device entry, saving teams the time of looking up data based on just a text. This will speed handoffs between teams and reduce errors, as well as improve accountability across the organization.

3. Faster trouble resolution

Networks have become complex systems that span multiple devices across multiple domains, working together through many different protocols. In any kind of dispersed system like this there's always the opportunity for problems to rear their ugly heads, and networks are no exception.

Fortunately, networks have many ways to provide resiliency and redundancy at multiple layers, so the impact of a problem can be minimized. However, if you want to help network teams resolve problems quickly, they need to all be aware of the issue in real-time and have immediate access to the information leading up to the problem. Network automations that integrate with a collaboration platform for updates and notifications can see a full accounting of what happened and when during a network event, reducing the time to resolve network problems when they occur.

Take Collaboration to the Next Level

If you can automate your network, you can very likely also automate the ways you keep your teams up to date on its status. By integrating collaboration tools into your network automation workflow, you can extract and format data within the automation and send out real-time messages to communicate and keep the entire team updated on the status of the network and any changes being implemented.

To take full advantage of these capabilities, the automation platform you use should offer the ability to easily create automations that can gather data for a network change, execute the network change, and broadcast a message to a team with detailed information on the network devices being changed, the nature of the changes, and when the changes begin and are completed — all while the automation is in execution. This eliminates the need for network engineers to stop the work they're doing to manually post an update so they can focus on getting more work done.

Integrating a collaboration platform into your network automation process can pay multiple dividends in the managing, monitoring and updating of your network. By dynamically querying devices, extracting data, and broadcasting status updates to your network teams, real-time insight into your network is just a click away.

Rich Martin is Director of Technical Marketing at Itential

Hot Topics

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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...