EDISON, N.J. — Nearly half (48%) of senior IT decision-makers in the U.S. and globally reported that, in the last two years, more than a quarter of their organization’s outages were caused by changes to network infrastructure. That’s according to a recent survey of 500 global IT decision makers commissioned by Opengear, a Digi Intl. company. 

The study, titled “Measuring the True Cost of Network Outages,” found that half (50%) of U.S. businesses and 44% globally were increasing the level of automation across the network to drive up network resilience within their organization and combat these outages.

In addition, nearly 60% of organizations — both in the U.S. and globally — have introduced a NetOps automation approach across network operations. Significantly, 95% of U.S. businesses and 89% of businesses globally reported that NetOps automation improved their network’s reliability, while just 1% overall said it had become less reliable.

“With outages on the rise, and network engineers currently unable to travel to affected sites to make fixes, network automation is rapidly becoming a necessity,” said Steve Cummins, vice president of marketing, Opengear. “Being able to use standard NetOps tools such as Docker, Python, and Ansible within the network management infrastructure itself simplifies and accelerates deployment of those automation routines. A NetOps-enabled console server can be the key to unlocking NetOps for many companies.”  

In addition to increased network reliability, respondents most commonly cited enhanced security (50% in the U.S. and 48% globally), time savings (48% in the U.S. and 45% globally) and cost savings (45% in the U.S. and 41% globally) as the biggest benefits of having a solution that could operate independently from the main in-band network and detect and remediate network issues automatically.