If you’ve worked long enough in networking, you’ve seen the same pattern repeat:
From our side of the fence, it’s “just” a routing flap, a misconfigured QoS policy, a latent bug in a firewall upgrade, or a few percent of packet loss in one path.
From the business side, it’s something very different:
Millions in lost trading profit.
Thousands of abandoned carts.
Surgery delayed because charts aren’t loading.
A production line halted, with forklifts parked and people standing around waiting for a PLC to come back to life.
Every network impairment is a business event wearing a technical disguise.
Yet a surprising number of companies still rely on manual changes, Excel CMDBs, “CAB theater,” and brittle CLI scripts as if they were adequate protection against this reality.
Let’s walk through why that’s no longer acceptable, and what a serious, software-centric approach to network automation looks like when it’s anchored in real business impact, not just “efficiency.”
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