Working together, automation and orchestration simplify network operations involving complex configurations and devices’ management while providing business agility to adapt to an ever-changing environment. You can think of automation as accomplishing repeatable tasks without human intervention, and orchestration as the process of stringing together a series of these tasks to accomplish a process or workflow. Driving network automation is the rapid expansion of network infrastructure required to support the exponential growth of network traffic generated by video, social media, data, and applications’ usage.
Additionally, as computing power continues to decline in cost and virtual computing continues to grow, network automation becomes more available to many businesses. Various types of network automation can apply to local area networks, virtualized environments, data centers, and public and private clouds. For many organizations, the lack of agility to adopt to network changes has become a bottleneck, preventing those companies from deploying a robust and highly responsive data center infrastructure. For service providers, automation is the cornerstone strategy to focus on to increase network agility and reliability while controlling operational expenditures (OpEx) and capital expenditures (CapEx).