As the global pandemic accelerated the digital transformation across different businesses, a great deal of automation had to take place to ease the pressure on IT teams. But this movement does not seem transitory.

After the initial panic of needing to make changes overnight to have operations running online and work done remotely, companies are now reassessing their strategies and further increasing automation and transformation, according to  Susie Wee (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of Cisco DevNet and CX ecosystem success at Cisco Systems Inc.

“What happens is that there’s an infrastructure that all of this is built on, and that infrastructure has networking, it has security,” Wee said. “And what matters is: How can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take customer data? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to really satisfy everything that businesses need?”

Wee, Mandy Whaley (center), senior director of Cisco DevNet and certifications at Cisco, and Eric Thiel (right), director of developer and technical advocacy at Cisco, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Accelerating Automation With DevNet event. They discussed the importance of increasing automation for companies, how this process depends on human skills and the possible benefits of these changes. (* Disclosure below.)

Businesses also want to increase observability

Automation is a way to make a businesses’ network infrastructure more efficient and agile, according to Wee. When working at scale, it is simply not possible for companies to configure settings manually.

“What you need to do is automate everything,” Wee pointed out. “You want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation, you can rise to a higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down on the stack by leveraging automation.”

In addition, a trend is for companies to seek to increase observability. This movement already existed before COVID-19, but it became even greater during the pandemic, according to Thiel.

“A lot of people have come to us looking for insights. ‘How can I get that better observability we now need as we’re virtual?” he said. “That’s actually been a huge uptick, and we’ve seen a lot of people that weren’t necessarily out looking for things before and that now are figuring out ‘How can I do this at scale?’”

These transformations have gained so much importance that they are no longer just an issue for IT teams, drawing the attention of key business leaders.

“All of a sudden, CEOs were actually calling on the heads of IT and saying: ‘How is our VPN connectivity as everybody is working from home? How many people are connected and able to work and watch their productivity?” Wee said. “All these things that were really infrastructure IT stuff became a board-level conversation.”

Bringing infrastructure and software expertise together

One major cornerstone of the digital transformation and automation processes is the human skill to manage the network infrastructure. In addition to leveraging technology, it is necessary to have people highly prepared for programmability.

“A networker has to be a network automation developer,” Wee said. “So, accelerating automation while it is about going digital, it is also about people rising to the level of being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications, of cloud-directed businesses and cloud growth.”

Highly skilled professionals in this area find a new set of job roles created by businesses undergoing their digital journey. “Partners, people in our community are really starting to look at things like DevSecOps engineer, network automation engineer, network automation developer and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization,” Whaley said.

The natural path for those who want to develop skills to take on these new job roles is to look for courses and certifications.

As a company that sells more and more software and tend to attract interest from developers, Cisco has expanded its developer network through DevNet, a program launched six years ago. The DevNet certification program has had various changes since then, with the most recent being an expansion of certifications to help professionals combine infrastructure expertise with programming.

“What we’re seeing is that people are at home, they’ve got time and they want to advance their skill set,” Whaley explained. “And just like any kind of learning, people want choice. They want to be able to choose which matches their time that’s available and their learning style.”

Although there are professionals who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors leading them through a study plan, others just prefer to read instructions and spend time in the DevNet sandbox trying out different technologies, according to Whaley.

Three areas are attracting a lot of interest. “One is around SD-WAN. Security is [another] focus area, where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways, and, then, automating their data center using infrastructure as code type principles,” Whaley said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Accelerating Automation With DevNet event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Accelerating Automation With DevNet event. Neither Cisco, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE