Automation has been a buzzword in business circles for decades now, and with good reason. Organizations are looking to cut costs and increase efficiency in an increasingly competitive environment and moving away from manual operations has been proven to be a big help in achieving this. Indeed, automation can be critical to the very survival of any enterprise in a world where consumers are more informed than ever.

Across the different functions of an organization automation is a necessity. In the field of network and security, automation has been made a key priority.

There are several reasons why businesses are particularly keen on this area of automation. These can be divided into two categories: business drivers and IT projects.

Business drivers

• Creating new revenue channels
• Business expansion
• Lowering operational costs
• Increasing productivity

IT projects

• Increasing network availability
• Security requirements
• Compliance requirements
• System maintenance
• Reducing human error

Networked systems for most businesses steadily increase in size and complexity as they grow over the years. Applications have to process more data and more people will need to access them, which means more devices and more traffic on the network.

A recent survey showed that 58 percent feel that the automation of network and security tasks are critical to the day to day operations of the business. There are many products in the market that offer security professionals productivity gains. Here are a few to consider alongside your existing solutions:

Next generation firewalls

• R80 management software from Check Point, for instance, automates and coordinates an organization’s security procedures.
• Tools like the Fortinet fabric ensure that security policies are applied evenly across different network devices via the Panorama Management Console.

Load balancers

• There are intelligent devices that make load balancing decisions based on data they receive from the servers connected to them. Local Traffic Manager, known as LTM, allocates traffic to servers based on their availability, performance and persistence. It is one of the modules available on the F5 Networks BIG-IP platform.

Switches

• Cisco’s Nexus series of switches are preferred by many organizations for the management of networked data centres in different locations. They simplify the management of networking operations by offering a centralized control point for LANs in a virtualized environment.

Task validation

Network management and security devices often have disparate architecture and run on different OSs. This leads to the creation of scripts which, more often than not, hamper, rather than facilitate, automation of tasks. It is important to have team that can develop good quality scripts that can be reused across devices.

By decreasing the network attack surface, this system great enhances resource availability. Find out more about how organizations can enhance the chances of success of the automation of their security operations by downloading this survey.

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