Across hybrid clouds, edge deployments and campus environments, network complexity has grown faster than most teams can manage manually. Industry estimates cited by Cisco suggest that despite the abundance of available tools, more than 65% of enterprise networking activities, including provisioning, troubleshooting, reporting and lifecycle management, remain manual. For agencies balancing security, compliance and limited staffing resources, that gap between available technology and actual practice is one of the clearest opportunities to improve in Federal IT today. A closer look at how Red Hat and Cisco approach this challenge together offers a practical roadmap for agencies ready to modernize their network operations.
The Growing Case for Network Automation
Network teams today oversee far more than a single data center. They support hybrid clouds, edge devices and everything in between, all while security and compliance requirements continue to expand and evolve. Scripting has served many organizations well as an early step toward automation, and there is now room to build on that foundation with an approach that scales more consistently across teams and adds stronger safeguards around credentials and configurations integrity. Advancing from proscriptive, one-time setups toward automation that keeps pace with today’s dynamic cloud environments represents a natural next step for teams ready to grow their capabilities.
Modern networks change constantly, and that pace of change is an invitation for automation to play a larger role in helping teams respond in real time. Bringing together the full range of stakeholders, from network engineers to the broader IT organizations, around a single, transparent approach to network management helps every team move forward together. This kind of alignment gives agencies a strong foundation for scaling automation across the entire IT environment, not just the network layer.
A Unified Automation Platform for Federal Networks
Red Hat and Cisco have built a partnership around a shared goal: making IT operations simpler, more consistent and easier to maintain. Many organizations run networking, cloud and security through separate tools and bringing these together under one common automation platform creates a clearer, more unified view of the environment for every team involved. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform delivers on this vision by integrating directly with Cisco platforms such as Meraki and Catalyst Center, allowing every deployment to originate from a single, approved source of code. This approach supports both prescriptive, task-driven automation and event-driven automation that can respond to changes in real time, applying the right fix the moment an issue is identified.
Both Meraki and Catalyst Center expose rich sets of Representational State Transfer (RESTful) Application Programming Interfaces (API), giving Ansible a programmable foundation to orchestrate workflows across the network rather than treating each platform as an isolated management console. Ansible extends this capability well beyond Cisco equipment, working across switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, servers and other infrastructure from a range of vendors. That flexibility also extends to ticketing systems; when integrated with platforms like ServiceNow, a request submitted through a ticket can trigger Ansible to complete the work and then automatically populate the ticket with the resulting configuration details.
Automation in Action: Proven Use Cases
Several validated use cases illustrate how this partnership translates into day-to-day operational value. Branch provisioning allows teams to apply a single, golden configuration across every new site, supporting consistent and rapid deployment as agencies scale to new locations. Audit and compliance checks give teams a read-only way to confirm that established network settings and status remain aligned with policy, helping teams stay ahead of configuration drift with confidence. When drift is detected against an approved source of truth, automation can either correct the configuration directly or generate a service ticket for review, giving teams a clear, controlled response built into the process itself.
A fourth use case, pre-shared key rotation, allows Ansible to automatically generate stronger keys and deploy them across Meraki access points on a regular cadence, giving administrators a consistent, hands-off way to keep security current. Additional workflows extend the same principles across the full device lifecycle, from zero-touch provisioning and software image management to configuration rollbacks and order changes, with playbooks available for teams to download and put into practice right away.
Faster, More Consistent, More Secure Operations
A leading insurance company used Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate its Meraki wireless and security appliances across the United States and Mexico. The result was simplified management of radio frequency (RF) profiles and Service Set Identifier (SSID) settings, greater in-house control over operations and faster device staging. A separate example described a Government agency where provisioning a new virtual machine, a process that once took nine days across systems, storage and networking teams, was streamlined to the time it takes to get a fresh cup of coffee once automation was in place.
These outcomes point to a broader lesson for agencies just getting started: automation does not need to happen all at once. A strong first step is often the task an agency performs most often or finds most valuable to streamline, whether that is a multi-step process with many moving parts or a simple task performed frequently enough that automating it creates meaningful time savings. From there, agencies can expand automation across teams and platforms at a pace that fits their operational needs, backed by enterprise-level support from both Red Hat and Cisco.
To learn more about how Red Hat and Cisco are helping Federal agencies strengthen network operations through automation, watch the full webinar, “Strengthen Federal Network Operations Through Automation.”
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