NetOps and SysOps Developer Salary in 2024

NetOps and SysOps

What is NetOps?

Network operations, or NetOps – also known as NetOps 2.0 or NetDevOps – uses modern DevOps tools and techniques to make network changes more successfully and safely than they were in the past.

And once upon a time, NetOps was short-hand for old-school network operations, which often meant stodgy, expensively over-engineered, static infrastructures. Today’s NetOps envisions agile, elastic, programmable networks that can better support quick application development cycles, says John Burke, chief information officer and principal research analyst at Nemertes Research.

Taking a page from DevOps, NetOps leverages automation and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) to streamline operations. The shift to treating infrastructure as code (IaC) is a core part of NetOps 2.0. To date, network teams have manually operated enterprise networks using command-line interface (CLI) scripting. Preventing network outages was the goal, and the KPI was controlling uptime as opposed to agility. As a result, network operations fell behind application development, a roadblock to digital transformation.

Why is NetOps important?

Where change is required, it is driven by the pressing need for applications and services inside a digital enterprise. This shift to NetOps 2.0 is being made because the network must also evolve alongside the digital enterprise, which expects its network services to be delivered in an instant. Legacy networks are rigid and demand too much operational overhead, forcing companies to accept the status quo.

Such outcomes are possible because network automation, orchestration and virtualisation – the ‘Operate’ aspect of the NetOps approach – can help an organisation react more quickly and predictably to both new requests and events, with a minimum amount of manual intervention. A shift to an Agile networking model delivers multiple tangible business benefits, from faster speed-to-service to improved data security, according to Andrew Froehlich, the president of West Gate Networks, a networking consulting company.

NetOps asks network teams to provide more capabilities at a faster rate to a much more distributed set of users without often significant budget increases for networking staff. To maintain these higher service levels with sustained continuous improvements, NetOps teams can make time for innovative tasks and not be held up with manual, self-inflicted errors, nor have to wait for vendor fixes. NetOps is about routinely improving the network through updates or configuration changes, not about being static and attempting to anticipate potential disruptions as a justifiable excuse for avoiding them. NetOps provides a robust way to create a more predictable, programmable network that is more capable of supporting agile business transformation while maintaining an enterprise’s hybrid environments connecting private cloud and/or on-premise network resources to public cloud solutions.

Benefits of a NetOps approach

Seen in that light, a NetOps model follows a DevOps-like pattern of continuous application development. Applications are the data services for the network, so a continuous model enables rapid application deployments, Froehlich says. ‘The three tenets of NetOps 2.0 – network virtualisation, network automation and AI-supported network monitoring – enable a networking team to operate modern networks that go beyond just on-premises networks to include virtual networks in public/private clouds,’ he continues.

Some benefits of NetOps include the following:

• Faster provisioning and deployment. With NetOps, network virtualisation allows the teams to provision and deploy network devices much faster through automation since the routers, switches and network security don’t need to be deployed as physical devices within the network structure.
• Continuous improvement. Network automation enables new applications and services to be deployed in a ‘continuous improvement’ mode.
• Preemptive remediation. AI-enabled network monitoring tools help NetOps teams do a better job of pre-emptively discovering and remediating network performance and security issues.
• Easier troubleshooting. AIOps (the use of AI for IT operations) and NDR (network detection and response) tools are becoming relatively commonplace in NetOps in order to accelerate network troubleshooting.
• Granularity of visibility and network analytics. Machine learning (ML) tools for monitoring network health and providing granular visibility into network analytics, behaviours and anomalies.

NetOps and security

NetOps teams have to secure their projects and initiatives, and so network and security teams need to be on the same page. A healthy NetSecOps model has teams aligning priorities and sharing both practice expertise and advice on the frameworks and architectures they use.

A good initial step toward closer collaboration between the two teams is figuring out how to share good data. Network data, when it’s on point, can help discover bad actors and tell you how to defend against attacks or stop them. In an Enterprise Management Associates survey done this year, more than 69 per cent of some 366 respondents said that security teams spin up traffic to anomaly detection and network direction or network traffic analysis devices (NDR). Another 57 per cent said they need traffic data to help with their incident response playbooks.

Network teams with formal security partnerships also felt like they were spending less time on reactive firefighting, and more time on fire prevention. NetOps-SecOps partnerships can improve network performance, especially since most breaches and most attacks first appear as network performance problems.

Networking and security teams aren’t always aligned yet, but partnerships between teams are getting more common. Putting aside allegiances to your team and understanding network and cyber-security processes are important first steps. You don’t need to be a guru or security expert, but a basic understanding of the ‘what’s, ‘why’s’ and ‘how’s of cyber-security, including:

• different types of cyber attackers;
• major types of cyber attacks; and
• the types of security services available.

Delving into how to harden NetOps using Agile, NetCraftsmen vice president and CTO John Cavanaugh looks at the use of Agile and service chaining vis-à-vis traditional Waterfall methods and infrastructure changes that go beyond putting forces in the right place but attend to the whole cultural change a developer, networking team and security practitioner must undergo to function optimally together.