Nearly every IT executive has fought the battle called the “Annual IT Budget Negotiation.” Who hasn’t been called into the CFO’s office a few times a year to justify why IT needs to spend money on infrastructure and systems that do not directly generate more business?

In today’s world pressure on IT is on two fronts:

1. IT is constantly being tasked with providing more and higher quality services with static or shrinking budgets. The need to support the business in a competitive environment and the agility to respond to business needs creates more pressure on IT Executives to be creative in providing innovative technology solutions. We are constantly seeking ways to reduce IT costs in conjunction with providing high performance systems that directly impact the business.
2. And the user community is becoming more sophisticated and demanding from IT to provide a different user experience. Users are bringing their personal experience with technology into the workplace and are expecting IT to provide the same level of support for example, which they receive when they visit a mobile device store. Over lunch a user will download an app that makes him more productive at work; he expects the IT solutions to be available faster and with the same type of user experience.

These two fronts put pressure on us IT Executives to respond to the new phenomena. In the past, the technology life cycle was relatively longer and business users were more tolerant with long execution lead times. But times have changed and companies that do not keep up with investing in technology will find themselves at a disadvantage compared to their competition.

This is what I call The Expectation gap; the gap between the need to provide solutions faster and better and the availability of budgets to meet these needs.

A recent article in Information Week discusses the Top 10 CIO priorities based on surveys performed over the last year http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/231901248?pgno=1 and interesting enough, the number one top priority and concern of CIOs is the speed in which IT can deliver solutions to meet business needs. You would expect cloud be high on the list (9^th out of 10) or the “consumerization” of IT (8^th out of 10). These new technologies are only the catalysts for IT to deliver solutions quicker without impacting quality or performance but are not the number one concern for the IT executive.

So, how do we close this gap? Network Automation is the key.

With Network Automation:

1. You will be able to dedicate your professional IT resources to work on more strategic activities and let the machines do the mundane tasks. This will reduce the time to roll out new solutions to the satisfaction of you constituencies and reduce the cost of performing the simple activities.
2. Your team will have better visibility into your network and reduce downtime by applying policies that will provide shorter restore time; increase accuracy and uptime.
3. The system will gather data and generate reports that will provide a clear insight into the health of the network, preventing unnecessary down-time.
4. Will reduce the complexity of the network and provide the tools for better management and control.