Building the Future: Network Service Assurance Modernization
Planning for the future is the key to any business strategy. 2022/3 brings change for CSPs. Telecoms workloads are moving to the cloud, and with it, the promise of new business opportunities, verticals, and capabilities is being realized.
Ambitious, complex, and dynamic as these changes may be for many service providers, they offer the opportunity to build a flexible, scalable network that will adapt to the needs of service providers and their customers for decades to come. But how will service providers plan for the future and ensure they build for the long term? And more importantly, how will they know that what they’re implementing is working?
That’s where service assurance comes into play. There has never been a more opportune time for service provider CTOs to consider or reconsider how network service assurance can help. Assurance cannot be an afterthought when developing new services or offerings. Assurance is more critical now than before, as it is the trigger for automation and orchestration. Integrating assurance into business planning early allows service providers to plan new service rollouts with confidence. It also ensures the quality of experience for customers, particularly the more demanding business customers that will come with network slicing, while constraining the costs of managing more complex networks.
Focus on Assurance
The first step is identifying the objectives of the plan. Considering assurance as central to the planning will allow service providers to take a holistic view of the business needs. So some considerations are:
Cloud-native
To effectively manage growing networks and increasing service complexity, service providers should look at assurance solutions that offer productized components that can spin up or down as needed in any cloud, be it private, public or hybrid. These products must be built on a platform closely linked to the network and provide insights and orchestration for software-driven flexibility, cost optimization, and energy efficiency.
Visibility of the network
5G SA and cloud bring new visibility challenges, but visibility is what service assurance is all about. Identifying problems, isolating root causes, and implementing fixes in the service and network have always been the goals of service assurance. With the move to cloud-based solutions, network and service assurance offerings across technologies are amalgamated to give service providers a holistic real-time view of their operations.
Automation and AI
Cloud brings complexity, and in the coming years, service providers will be managing many more logical networks via network slicing. To address this sensibly, real-time, closed-loop automation and intent-driven orchestration that acts on subscriber data via service assurance are needed. How can an operator implement orchestration or automation without knowing the impact on their subscribers? This is the question that should be front and center in all operators’ minds.
Roadmapping for success
No plan is complete without a roadmap. To achieve an effective transition to an automated, scalable network, service providers should include the following in their roadmap:
Cloud Journey
While some service providers request public cloud-based options for telecoms workloads, most deployments, for now, are still on-prem or in private clouds. Operators should own their cloud journey, avoid vendor or cloud lock-in, and test as they go with assurance systems in place.
Data
Data is the new oil. While a service assurance partner can help guide and provide best practices on data optimization for assurance systems, service providers will need a complete strategic view and plan of data and how it is used to make business and operational decisions. Autonomous networks, which is the end goal of automation, will need trusted data.
AIOps
AIOps is an IT term that is moving over to telecoms. It is the use of AI to manage the services in an IT network. With telecoms moving to the cloud, the IT and telecoms worlds are aligning. AIOps are going to be critical to the success of this transition. It’s only with the implementation, using telecoms-specific domain knowledge, of closed-loop automation and AI/ML intelligence that service providers will be able to build a flexible network. Operators should consider their roadmap for success here.
The key takeaway for service providers is this: Design with intent. As you consider what is needed to manage operations over the coming decade, be conscious of your and your customers’ needs. Find vendors that can be trusted partners in this process. Understand that service assurance is more than troubleshooting in your planning; it is the key to driving automation, orchestration, and, ultimately, autonomous networks. This will bring scalable, flexible offerings that will delight customers and corporate customers with new services and capabilities.
