This blog kicks off a two‑part series on the business value of network automation and how to win C‑suite buy‑in. Part two will share proven tactics for sustaining executive engagement and highlight common pitfalls to avoid when building your automation strategy.
Why is network automation critical for businesses in 2025?
Network automation orchestrates how you plan, deploy and operate network services across data centres, clouds and the edge. Done well, it lifts service reliability, reduces change risk and compresses time‑to‑value by removing repetitive, manual tasks that are prone to error. The business case has only strengthened in the AI era, as AI‑assisted operations and modern application traffic put new pressure on network scale and agility. Recent global studies show leaders expect automation to underpin this shift, with 60% planning AI‑enabled predictive network automation across domains within two years.
Adoption is accelerating. Gartner forecasts that by 2026, 30% of enterprises will automate more than half of their network activities, up from under 10% in mid‑2023. This trend reflects how Infrastructure & Operations teams are using analytics, AIOps and intelligent automation to boost resilience and service velocity. At the same time, market evidence still shows significant headroom. Independent community surveys and analyst research indicate many organisations have automated less than half of day‑to‑day network tasks, citing skills, organisational and technology barriers as the top obstacles.
The ROI picture is also clearer than ever. Prior research from EMA found that around half of data‑centre network automation projects achieved ROI within two years, and more recent enterprise networking studies highlight how a modernised, automated network directly improves customer experience, employee productivity and revenue growth. Meanwhile, Cisco’s 2025 networking research quantifies the cost of inaction: 77% of organisations report major outages over the last two years, with the impact of a single severe disruption extrapolated to $160B globally, underscoring the value of automation for risk reduction.
How to create a successful business case
Step 1: Lead with evidence
According to an article by Enconnex, the weakest link in data operations tends to be humans, with human error accounting for ~80% of all outages. Existing pipelines in businesses tend to operate sequentially and manually, increasing the probability of human error through the involvement of multiple individuals in the chain of events.
Step 2: Outline a strategic software development process
Ensuring each step of the operational process from integration to delivery is tested and accounted for and outlining this in a cohesive plan for the C-suite level will help earn their trust. Developing a process flow that outlines a long-term strategy and what the business will achieve through network automation will further encourage this crucial buy-in. A visualisation tool or platform to convey this can significantly enhance their understanding.
Step 3: Stage a production deployment in a test environment
Unlike application testing, network testing is often difficult because the network itself doesn’t exist in isolation and is nearly always the lowest level of the technical stack. This makes performing tests complex. While the applications within a development or pre-production environment are often considered non-production, the underlying network to these application test environments is nearly always considered “production” in that it must work, in a production-like, always-on, fault-free state for the applications atop it to be tested and fulfil their function. Replicating complex enterprise, data centre or even cloud networks often come at a price. Organisations can typically only duplicate or approximate small proportions of their network estate. As a result, staging looks more like unit testing in software development by making small but incremental gains and applying them exponentially to the production network looking to be automated.
While many organisations may opt for a waterfall, agile or other project management approach, we nearly always find that an agile-like, iterative, unit-tested approach to developing network automations – such as scripts, runbooks, playbooks and modules — are more beneficial in pushing automation both into the organisation and into wider adoption than any other approach.
Step 4: Prove that benefits will be reaped through the staged production
One of the benefits of modern network engineering is quickly leveraging the commoditisation of the vertically integrated network hardware stack the industry has embarked upon over the last decade. It is now easier – and cheaper – than ever before to spin up a virtual machine, container or other VNF/NFV-equivalent of a production router, switch, firewall, proxy or other network device that will look, feel, act and fail in the same way that its production network equivalent device would. When combined with software development approaches like CI/CD pipelines for deployment and rapid prototyping of network automation code, this can be a winning combination to rapidly pre-test activities within ephemeral container-like staging environments and maintain dedicated staging areas which look like production.
How can CACI help?
CACI’s team comprises multidisciplined IT, networking infrastructure and consultant and automation engineers with extensive experience in network automation. We can support and consult on every aspect of your organisation’s network from its architecture, design and deployment through to cloud architecture adoption and deployment, as well as maintaining an optimised managed network service.
To learn more about the impact of network automation and how to sell its value to the C-suite, please read our e-book “How to sell the value of network automation to the C-suite”. You can also get in touch with the team here.