Automation could cut network costs and fund IT innovations

Today, CIOs and IT managers are being tasked with figuring out how to move more of their ‘run the business’ operational expense into innovation efforts. Over the next 12-18 months, we will see the focus on ‘IT innovation’ increase, in which the adoption of technologies for digital transformation such as cloud, mobility, data, security, social, and the internet of everything will reach new scale and open up new opportunities.

As organizations explore new digital initiatives, the resulting complexity will increase pressure on IT operations, management and support. As more and more devices are added to the evolving internet of everything, additional data sources will need to be secured, monitored and managed. In addition, CIOs also need to be able to unlock intelligence from their IT infrastructure to support faster, better decision making.

This brings in more complexity to operations management and more support issues adding pressure on many enterprise budgets. By incorporating automation, rather than relying solely on human intervention, to solve many network management and support issues, organizations can adopt a proactive strategy and focus more on meeting the demands of business and keep costs under control.

Automation of network operations and management tasks could reduce network operations costs by up to 20 percent. The savings would fund the needed investments in IT innovation and performance. By automating operations, IT can automatically configure network, compute and collaboration devices and software to prevent incidents or reduce the impact of those that can’t be avoided. That alleviates time and costs spent responding to user complaints and tracking down inefficiencies and problems, and leaves more time to focus on IT transformation”

Managing Director - Enterprise & Public Sector, Cisco.