We've all met them. The rogue engineer who logs straight into a router's CLI, types away like a gunslinger in a showdown, and disappears into the digital sunset—no change control, no rollback plan, no comms with the team. Just boom: “I’ve fixed it!” Until... well, they haven’t.

These are the cowboys of networking. And their saloon? The CLI.

🌵 The CLI Wild West

Traditional networks were never built with structure in mind. Back in the early days of networking, protocols were basic, and the gear even more so. Things were hand-crafted in the CLI—every route, every policy, every ACL meticulously built one keystroke at a time.

There was no automation. No central orchestration. No safety nets.

So when something broke, it was down to whoever could ssh in first and start throwing commands at the problem. Some changes were repetitive and relatively safe; others were one-liners that, when mistyped, sawed the branch off from the wrong side, isolating entire sites with a misplaced static route or VLAN config.

No audit trail. No peer review. Just packet loss, pings timing out, and an engineer going: "Hmm, that's weird."

🚨 The Problem with Cowboy Networking

Cowboy networking is unpredictable. While some engineers are brilliant and do “fix things” on the fly, the reality is that:

There’s no standardisation, making support and onboarding a nightmare
No rollback plan, meaning every mistake becomes a major outage
No documentation, so changes die with the engineer’s memory
Recovery procedures are usually “hope” and “remote hands, eventually”

It’s dangerous in environments with multiple sites, complex dependencies, and minimal tolerance for downtime. Like, say, every modern business.

Let’s say you push a new config and reboot a router. If it doesn’t come up, a technician might have to be sent on-site with:

A serial console cable
The previous working config
The new (possibly broken) config
The correct firmware image
A bag of patience

Even this “recovery plan” assumes the cowboy wrote anything down, which is... unlikely.

🛰️ The SD-WAN Difference | Civilising the Frontier

Now enter SD-WAN—especially solutions like Fusion's SD-WAN—and the game changes.

There’s no more cowboying into random sites and fiddling with routing tables. Why? Because SD-WAN introduces:

Centralised management: All configs are pushed from a portal with full visibility
Automated rollbacks: If something fails, the system can fall back or reroute traffic
Workflow enforcement: You can’t just ssh in and fiddle with stuff anymore
Audit trails: Every change is logged and attributable
Zero-touch provisioning: Even a branch in a small town can be brought online securely, without needing a serial console cowboy to ride in

Fusion’s SD-WAN, for instance, uses overlays and cloud intelligence to make decisions that were previously left to the instincts of the engineer. It’s structured, repeatable, and designed to recover from failure scenarios without someone climbing onto a roof with a console cable and a prayer.

📜 Structure Replaces Spaghetti

With SD-WAN, such as the one from Fusion, you go from reactive, tribal-knowledge-driven chaos to proactive, governed change management. Engineers still matter (of course!), but now they work in teams with plans, visibility, and confidence that their change won’t isolate the CFO during a video call.

No more Wild West. Just a well-run town with order, accountability, and uptime.

🧩 Wrapping Up

It’s time to hang up the cowboy hat. Networks have evolved, and so should the way we manage them. If your business relies on uptime, remote sites, or cloud applications, cowboy networking just isn’t good enough anymore.

SD-WAN doesn’t just eliminate the lone wolf approach—it civilises your network infrastructure, makes it manageable, resilient, and future-proof.

So the next time you hear someone say “I’ll just jump in quickly and fix it,” maybe ask if they’re using a horse or an SD-WAN portal. One’s more likely to get you out of the dust storm.

🤠 Cowboy Networking | How the Wild West Still Exists in Modern IT