Network operations and security professionals at large companies are overwhelmed by an increase in the pace of network upgrades and tech stack sprawl, a lack of support from leadership, and indecision around how to fix network issues, according to network automation provider Backbox.

Backbox partnered with Wakefield Research for a survey that found that 92% of these technology professionals at companies with 500 or more employees say there are more network updates needed than they can keep up with.

“We are hearing stories about network teams that year-round are constantly dealing with upgrade situations, upgrading what are now hundreds of firewalls to their latest version,” said Backbox Director of Product Management Chanoch Marmorstein.

Considering maintenance windows, downtime, and human error, many network teams take a considerable amount of time completing upgrades just to discover that they need to upgrade again when a new vulnerability is discovered. “This is constant work for those teams to do this update and takes most of their time,” Marmorstein told SDxCentral.

The report found that as tech stacks grow, it becomes more difficult to keep networks up to date, and larger companies are less likely to maintain updates than their smaller-sized counterparts. Of those with 1,000 or more employees, 68% said their company updates their network and security devices only quarterly or less often compared to 53% of companies with 500-999 employees.

And while the vast majority of these professionals (93%) say they have trust issues with network automation, almost all (98%) agree that automated network operations will allow their team to focus on more impactful work.

Automation can offload “a lot of the things that are mundane, that teams don't want to spend time on but are super critical to the organization,” BackBox CTO Josh Stephens said. BackBox customers use their library of over 2,000 automations for "several use cases," the first being to backup and restore configurations to firewalls or other network devices.

“That’s a lot harder than it sounds. Oftentimes backing up and restoring firewalls involves loading multiple files in specific order and OS configuration. So that's a big part of what customers want to do is automate those backups and restores,” Stephens told SDxCentral.

Companies are also looking to automate upgrades to firewalls and other network devices, which in today’s cyber threat landscape need to be updated constantly because of the mounting volume of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) being identified in those devices.

“You need to evaluate the devices, their risk level, what OS they're on, known CVEs, what they should be on when their change windows are... It's really complex. So people would like to just get that off their plate and let the automation system handle upgrades,” Stephens added.

Large companies are also looking to automate configuration grooming, Stephens said. Network and security teams make configuration changes on their routers and other network infrastructure as a “normal part of operations.”

Oftentimes, changes over time bring configurations out of compliance. “So part of what the product does is audits configurations for compliance, and then can automate the remediation, putting them back where they should be from a compliance standpoint,” Stephens added.

BackBox recently released the first in a series of compliance automation templates based on the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks. The templates are initially available to support Check Point and Fortinet devices, but the provider plans to make them available for Cisco devices next, followed by vendors including F5, Palo Alto Networks, and Juniper Networks.

The BackBox automation templates are able to run tests to check for CIS compliance and also remediate the problem, Marmorstein noted. “So in a click of a button, a customer can run automation to say, ‘Please test to see if I'm compliant or not. And if I'm not compliant, please fix the problem and make me compliant,'” he said.

Trust is still low when it comes to automation systems, with a third of BackBox’s surveyed professionals reporting their leadership is “skeptical of automation.”

“Customers are different in terms of how automated they want to be,” Stephens said.

Some companies only automate tests, and some automate check and remediation. Other BackBox customers are suspicious enough of automation that they “want a visual cue and the ability to click OK in between that transition.”

BackBox has 600 customers around the world and manages around 100,000 networks, according to Stephens. And with new devices added to these networks every week, he said leadership will have no choice but to get on the automation train.

Although it’s not commonly asked for today, Stephens predicts that soon cyber insurance carriers will start asking companies to prove CIS compliance before agreeing to insure breaches.

“This is becoming really commonplace out there and organizations,” Stephens said. “An end-to-end automation cycle is super important, especially when new devices are being added to the network that might compromise your otherwise pristine security hygiene.”