In the modern networking landscape, automation has become a crucial component of managing increasingly complex infrastructures. Traditional network automation methods, often implemented in a non-declarative manner, have served as the backbone for automating repetitive tasks, reducing human error, and improving overall efficiency. However, these methods come with inherent challenges and limitations that can hinder scalability and flexibility.

Universities are increasingly relying on IT infrastructure to meet the diverse needs of their faculty and students. As both the number of Cloud-based enterprise solutions and the users increase, there is a compelling need for automation and orchestration, and a user-friendly interface accessible to all members of the university community to ensure efficient and effective utilization of resources.

Automating the deployment of services within an organisation is an expensive proposition. Even with today's automation ready infrastructure, to get that automation being used successfully in production requires a large amount of time from expensive integration resources. In addition, the project management infrastructure that needs to go on top of it. In this article we discuss how defining and offering your services ahead of that automation spend can produce better and more valuable business outcomes.