What is NetOps?

NetOps is a network operations model that stresses agility and rapid deployment. Automation, virtualization, and orchestration are used in this approach.

NetOps, also known as NetOps 2.0 or NetDevOps, is a network operations methodology that employs DevOps tools and techniques to implement network modifications more efficiently and effectively than in the past.

NetOps was previously an acronym for traditional network operations, frequently resulting in rigid, complex, and static infrastructure.

To streamline operations, NetOps integrates automation and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD). NetOps 2.0 represents a significant paradigm shift by treating infrastructure as code (IaC).

Table of Contents:

• An Introduction of NetOps
• Importance of NetOps
• Benefits of a NetOps approach
• NetOps vs. DevOps
• NetOps and security
• How NetOps promotes teamwork between departments
• Future of NetOps

Why is NetOps important?

The goal is to make legacy networks more responsive and flexible to overcome limitations.

By leveraging network automation, orchestration, and virtualization, NetOps may enable a company to respond rapidly and reliably to new requests and events.

Network teams are challenged to provide excellent capabilities to distribute consumers more quickly and frequently without adding more networking workers.

To manage the increasing burden, NetOps teams may build a proactive, programmable network that better supports digital transformation while also working in hybrid environments with public and private cloud connections.

NetOps staff anticipate frequent changes and strive to mitigate their side effects rather than entirely avoid them.

Why is a NetOps approach needed?

Continuous network automation and validation are intended to streamline network operations and promote agility and innovation while boosting speed and availability.

Despite this, network troubleshooting still consumes a sizable portion of NetOps engineering effort and has to be improved with agile platform techniques.

DevOps has integrated techniques like automation and orchestration to significantly shorten reaction times and development cycles to accomplish this goal.

The network and network management must take on a more significant role in the development process due to the advent of complex digital organizations and the requirement for higher agility and faster content delivery.

 NetOps teams want insights to enable quicker decision-making and an integrated picture of performance and health.

Network operations can now participate in the development process thanks to NetOps, which applies DevOps concepts like automation, orchestration, and virtualization to network operations.

Teams from NetOps and DevOps can share a shared understanding of the data by maintaining consistency across infrastructure and application data.

Benefits of a NetOps approach

• Continuous enhancement. Network automation enables the deployment of new applications and services with the goal of continual improvement.
• Proactive remediation Network performance and security issues can be identified and resolved more proactively with AI network monitoring tools.
• Simpler troubleshooting proactively. Network detection and retries have gained popularity in NetOps to expedite network troubleshooting.

NetOps vs. DevOps

• NetOps, DevOps, and SecOps are three relatively recent approaches involved in successful agile deployments: networking, development, and security.
• They should be interdependent and part of a collaborative process.
• NetOps is concerned with automating network services and operations, whereas DevOps is concerned with automating application delivery.
• DevOps looks at IT operations, whereas NetOps focuses on day-to-day network operations.
• For network automation, provisioning, and configuration management, NetOps often use Ansible or Python. 
• DevOps typically uses technologies such as Chef or Puppet to automate configuration management.

NetOps and security

NetOps teams must safeguard their projects and efforts, necessitating collaboration between network and security teams.

 Teams coordinate their priorities and share best practices and guidance on the frameworks and architectures they employ in a functioning NetSecOps paradigm.

Finding ways to communicate high-quality data is a good place to start deeper collaboration between the two teams. When used correctly, network data can assist in tracking down malicious actors and provide insights into how to prevent or stop assaults.

In addition, network teams with formal security partnerships reported spending less time on reactive troubleshooting and more time on proactive problem avoidance.

 Partnerships between NetOps and SecOps can increase network performance, mainly because security breaches and attacks frequently manifest as network performance issues.

How NetOps promotes teamwork between departments

Even minor changes to typical network operations can set off a chain reaction. 

Network operations teams are increasingly in charge of other infrastructure services, such as network security, multipath WAN optimization, load balancing, and remote access.

Because of this teamwork collaboration, the traditional network operations centre (NOC) is evolving into a more unified operations centre where all teams collaborate more closely.

While NOC modernization is not for everyone, smart enterprises are optimizing operations to avoid long downtimes and improve the resilience of applications and services.

Future of NetOps

Enterprise network performance is typically managed by network operations teams using performance monitoring tools.

But as network deployments and usage have grown, many businesses are searching for new ways to monitor performance.

NetOps teams should find strategies to ensure the network remains operational and operates at its best as IT infrastructure becomes more complicated.

NetOps teams recognize that the amount of network health and performance data collected will outstrip their ability to keep up with it. Using AIOps tools to automatically evaluate data and provide fixes for network performance issues could be a viable solution.

The development of NetOps has increased the need for network professionals to have a foundational understanding of automation and programming, as well as the soft skills required to interact proactively with other teams and users. 

Enterprise networking teams will need to learn to embrace change and manage risk rather than avoid it to implement NetOps 2.0, which will involve a considerable cultural transformation.