Networking teams have invested heavily in automation to help them manage increasing workloads and reduce manual tasks. Yet many still face the same issues, like outages, stalled operations, and managing growing incident volume.
This problem isn’t a lack of automation: it’s what happens after automation runs. Automation is useful for individual tasks, but it can’t handle the complexity of real-world networking processes, which demand coordination across teams, environments, and tools. To build truly effective, reliable, and scalable network operations, teams need to go beyond automation and use orchestration to connect workflows and systems end to end.
Where automation breaks down
For networking teams, automation typically involves scripts, runbooks, and tool-native automation.
These approaches are useful for handling discrete tasks – like configuration updates and alert responses – as they reduce manual effort and speed up individual actions. But this kind of automation has limitations:
Scripts are hard to scale and maintain over time, depend on institutional knowledge to update, and lack the flexibility and control required for complex use cases
Runbooks struggle to adapt in real time, frequently require human oversight and manual involvement to run, and can ultimately take as much time to manage as they save
Tool-native automation usually operates only within a single tool or step, locking you into specific vendors and ways of working while creating silos between systems that teams must manually bridge
While automation promises quick wins and less work, it quickly breaks down in real operational workflows:
Automated alerts flag incidents, but teams must still investigate, triage, and gather context across multiple tools to make decisions, then create and share updates with relevant stakeholders
Network change approvals are initiated automatically but require coordination between multiple teams and systems, leading to manual handoffs, bottlenecks, and limited visibility into progress
Access requests trigger automatically but may come without critical context (like the requester’s role or business need), requiring teams to manually validate and log evidence to ensure proper governance and auditability
In each case, the same underlying problem emerges. Networking teams’ work spans multiple systems. Automation can’t bridge these gaps, so humans need to. When humans must act as the “integration” layer, teams get slowed down, manual effort increases, and risk is introduced, threatening reliability, auditability, and security. All of this makes processes inconsistent and hard to scale.
When it comes to increasing operational efficiency, it’s not just a matter of detection or tooling. The real problem – and opportunity – for networking teams lies in the work that happens between tools.
Orchestration is the missing operational layer
This is where orchestration comes in. Orchestration is the process of coordinating workflows across systems, people, and processes. Rather than automating individual tasks in isolation, it connects multi-system workflows, using conditional logic and decisions while keeping humans in the loop where needed.
Orchestration standardizes best practices across workflows, improving governance, auditability, and compliance for your organization while reducing manual effort and coordination for networking teams.
Why orchestration is crucial to scale networking operations
As network operations become more complex, teams must keep pace to ensure critical systems remain performant and reliable. Today’s networking teams need to:
Respond to incidents quickly to minimize impact across the organization
Manage changes safely across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments to ensure consistency
Maintain uptime across environments to protect business resilience and efficiency
What’s more, they must do it all while operating across multi-vendor environments, managing a sprawling number of APIs and integrations, and facing increasing operational demands, like compliance requirements, SLAs, and end-user (and stakeholder) expectations for high availability.
Network automation tools alone can’t fully support this. Automation fails at scale because it:
Doesn’t handle coordination between tools, processes, and teams, which – as we’ve seen – is where much of the manual work lies
Increases operational complexity over time, as teams must continuously maintain and update scripts and legacy code
Relies on individual knowledge, creating silos and continuity issues when engineers leave or new team members join
Orchestration addresses these challenges by standardizing workflows, reducing manual coordination and handoffs, and improving consistency and governance. This doesn’t just eliminate muckwork: it also reduces burnout and strengthens organizational security by minimizing opportunities for human error.
4 intelligent workflows to get started with today
With an intelligent workflow platform, networking teams can start orchestrating key processes in moments. Intelligent workflows connect work across systems, tools, and teams to enable orchestration at scale, combining:
Deterministic automation to handle highly predictable, reliable, and controlled tasks
Agentic AI to assess context, make decisions, and execute tasks autonomously based on defined guidance
Humans for high-impact, high-stakes tasks that require judgment and creativity
Start with a few powerful use cases, then expand as you see results and build confidence over time.
1. Network incident response
Accelerate network incident response with orchestrated workflows that investigate, analyze, and enrich alerts, helping you quickly identify which ones need your attention. When security threats are detected, trigger containment workflows to isolate the issue and manage incident communications, so your team can focus on remediation.
Create & manage incident communications with Slack and Jira
This Story allows teams to create and manage incident communication directly through Slack. It can create Slack channels for communications, and sync conversation backups to a Jira ticket for long-term preservation.
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2. Firewall rule and network change management
Orchestrate firewall rule lifecycle management to increase visibility, enforce policies consistently, and reduce configuration errors and security gaps. Automatically validate requests against defined rules and policies, route to specific approvers based on risk level, and keep your audit trail up to date.
Receive Azure Sentinel alerts and block IPs with firewall rules
Setup an event subscription in Azure Sentinel to send new alerts to a webhook. If the alert is related to Brute Force attacks, setup a network security rule to block access from the source IP.
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3. Access request workflows
Use intelligent workflows to enrich access requests with all the necessary context for decision-making, then validate against identity and access management systems using defined policies. Automatically provision access based on user roles and business requirements, including time-based and just-in-time access, and deprovision accounts once the period has ended to reduce attack surface.
Onboard employees to BambooHR and grant access to office suites and Microsoft Teams
Run a report against BambooHR to pull details of all employees recently hired. It then creates a user in Okta, Google Workspace and Office 365, and adds the employee to their department channel in Microsoft Teams.
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4. Certificate and DNS operations
Orchestrate certificate and DNS operations to monitor expirations and lifecycle status, automate the renewal process, and update DNS records across environments. Validate certificate chains and trust relationships, enforce compliance, and maintain certificate hygiene across all systems to minimize service disruptions.
Monitor TLS certificates for a domain with SSLMate
Monitor TLS certs associated with a domain using SSLMate. Post updates seen to certificates in Slack.
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Scale network operations with orchestration
Automation is necessary – but it's not enough on its own. Instead, modern networking operations must connect tools, people, and processes into a single workflow.
The teams that scale successfully don’t just automate individual tasks: they orchestrate how work moves across systems. Orchestration is the operational layer that helps networking teams improve visibility, enforce governance, and reduce manual effort, enabling them to extend capacity beyond their headcount and keep critical business infrastructure running reliably and securely.
Explore intelligent workflows and find the right ones for your networking team with our Workflow capability matrix.