In several parts of the world December 6 is a day that especially children look forward to:  It's St. Nicholas Day and children hope to be on St. Nicholas' good side to receive a small gift. If you want to read more about the different activities to celebrate St Nicholas Day, you can learn more about it on Wikipedia. Numerous stories, some miraculous, are told about Nicholas, and often IT professionals are tasked to do work that borders on miracles or at least a many good stories can be told.

Now one of the best gifts anyone can give or receive is the gift of time. As we all know most IT professionals spend their waking (and non-waking) hours to keep the lights on. This is to stay out of trouble (fewer troubleshooting tickets is good), have more time to respond, and deliver on business needs (not responding in a timely fashion to line of business and developers is bad).

If you are an IT professional you know that to free up time in your day-to-day work,network programmability and automationis crucial for being on the right (good) side of your customers.  To help you with achieving that. a few months ago we released an updated  whitepaper on Network Programmability and Automation with Cisco Nexus 9000 based on Cisco NX-OS, where we talked about the concept of the "data center strategy" becoming a "critical part of business strategy overall".

Today, more than ever, the ways and means of IT deployment can make the difference between an efficient, successful organization and an inefficient one. That is because today's apps and services support increasing numbers of business operations and create competitive differentiation in many industries. However, the resulting proliferation of apps and their underlying infrastructure is increasingly placing greater burdens on IT staff, demanding more from IT than ever before. One of the major burdens is the management complexity and the time required, which is considerable when you factor in what's involved in configuring, deploying, and managing this infrastructure.

In addition if you are looking to gain a deeper understanding of Network programmability and automation, or still looking for a (St Nicholas) gift Cisco Press has the right book for you with 'Programming and Automating Cisco Networks: A guide to network programmability and automation in the data center, campus, and WAN'.

You can check it out from the Ciscopress online store. All the while as the best things in life are for free you can find sample codes and scripts for Cisco NX-OS on this website.

In case you are looking for some additional gift ideas: Give yourself a pass for Cisco Live Berlin 2017 with an Early Bird Fee registration until Dec 19, 2016, and from our colleagues at Cisco DevNet, check out their Gift Guide.

Enjoy the reading, and the time saved by applying what you learned.

Klaus @schwegler_k

Image Source: Pixabay