Home/Services/Consultancy/Network Automation

Network Automation

Most automation advice comes from software, applied to network devices afterwards.

The tooling is well understood. The operational risk of automating a live production network usually is not. This assessment starts from the network and works toward the tooling, in that order.

Network-first assessmentNo platform affiliationAdvisory-only

Most network automation advice originates in software and is applied to network devices afterwards. The tooling is well understood; the risk of automating a live production network often is not.

This specialization establishes what should be automated, in what order, what must be standardized first, and what should not be automated at all.

Bought as a fixed fee scoped to estate size and change volume. Frequently commissioned before hiring, so roles are defined against a roadmap.

Consultancy Services — the third of three service lines. Recruitment gives you the people; Professional & Managed Services does the work for you; Consultancy decides what work should be done.

What that costs you

What the sequencing question costs when nobody answers it.

  • Platform licences are bought and then underused, because the sequencing question was never answered.
  • Manual change volume keeps growing, and with it the error rate.
  • Configuration drift accumulates without detection until an incident makes it visible.
  • The organization concludes automation does not work here, when what failed was the order of operations.

Why the usual answer fails

Two failure modes dominate.

Two failure modes dominate. Automation that works in a lab and breaks in production, because blast radius was never modelled. And automation programmes that stall indefinitely, because nobody could say with confidence what should be automated first.

How we work

Sequence first, tooling second.

We establish what should be automated, in what sequence, and what has to be standardized before any of it is worth attempting — grounded in building vendor-qualification and migration frameworks across large regulated production estates, including a 10,000+ user migration executed without disruption to safety-critical operations.

The questions that shape the assessment are usually these:

  • What should never be automated here, and does everyone agree on that list?
  • If a change is pushed to 200 devices and the twelfth one fails, what happens to the other 188?
  • Are your device configurations consistent enough that a template is describing reality, or would a template overwrite forty exceptions nobody documented?
  • Who approves an automated change at 2am, and what is the rollback path when they are asleep?

The first question is the one that separates a useful automation programme from an expensive one. A script that runs successfully is not the same as automation you can trust in production.

What you receive

The deliverable.

  • A prioritized roadmap: what to automate, in what order, and what to leave alone
  • A standardization gap analysis — what must be made consistent before automation is viable
  • An assessment of tooling fit against your estate, with no vendor position
  • Rollback and approval-path recommendations for automated change

Technologies assessed

What the assessment covers.

TerraformAnsiblePythonCisco IOS / IOS-XEGit-based change validationCI/CD concepts

How it is bought

Fixed fee, scoped to the estate.

Fixed fee, scoped to estate size and change volume. Frequently commissioned before hiring, so the roles are defined against a roadmap rather than a guess.

Who it's for

Enterprise IT

An estate that has outgrown manual administration.

MSPs

Automation applied across multiple client environments.

Regulated organizations

Change control and auditability as design constraints.

Multi-site operators

Standardization before scale.

Typical buyer situations

You are likely in scope if any of these is true:

  • A platform has been purchased and the sequencing question was never answered.
  • Automation works in a lab and breaks in production.
  • Device configurations carry undocumented exceptions a template would overwrite.
  • Nobody can say what should be automated first.

What happens next

  1. 1A scoping call establishes what you want automated and what standardization already exists to automate against.
  2. 2The assessment sequences the programme by production risk and readiness rather than by what is easiest to script.
  3. 3You receive the sequence, the prerequisites, and what should not be automated yet.

Fixed fee. If you then need engineers to build it, that is a separate engagement on the recruitment line and is priced separately.

Common questions

Frequently asked questions.

What does the assessment deliver?

A prioritized roadmap: what to automate, in what order, what must be standardized first, and what should not be automated at all.

Do you build the automation?

No. Advisory-only. If you need engineers to execute, that is our recruitment line under a separate engagement.

Do you recommend a platform?

We assess what fits the environment. We hold no resale relationship with any automation vendor, so there is no commercial pull toward a particular answer.

We have already bought a platform. Is this still useful?

Frequently more useful. The common problem is not platform choice but sequencing and standardization.

How does this relate to hiring automation engineers?

Cleanly separated. This tells you what to do; recruitment finds the people to do it.

How do you decide what to automate first?

By production risk and standardization readiness, not by what is easiest to script. The sequence matters more than the tooling: an estate carrying forty undocumented configuration exceptions is not ready for a template, and automating it would simply make the inconsistency fail faster.

Related services

Where this decision leads next.

Once the roadmap exists, executing it is a hiring question — Network Automation Engineers recruits against exactly this profile.

Answer the sequencing question before spending on the platform.

A scoping call establishes the estate, the change volume and what you are trying to achieve.