As networks become more complex, elastic, and autonomous, communications service providers (CSPs) need to take new approaches to service assurance to maintain the high quality that customers demand. While artificial intelligence (AI) will play an important role in these efforts, the move to lights-out operations won’t happen overnight. To get there, CSPs must learn to balance automation with human activity to increase speed, minimize risk, and ensure the data quality required for making business-critical decisions.
In a recent podcast, FutureNet World Founder and CEO Giles Cummings interviewed BMC Software Technology Strategist Ian Russ on the key operational and technological changes that will enable CSPs to meet more aggressive service level agreements (SLAs) and customer expectations.
Topics explored in the far-reaching conversation include:
- Shifting service assurance from a resource-centric model to a service-centric model guided by the impact on customers
- Building trust and strengthening governance for AI-driven network orchestration
The conversation also covered the growing adoption of DevOps, DataOps, and site reliability engineering (SRE) concepts within service assurance. “If we look at taking some of the DevOps principles and applying them to DataOps, where instead of having multiple teams…getting, transforming, and consuming the data, [we] give the teams who consume the data the ability to manage how they retrieve, [transform, and process] it…you can get much higher levels of speed [and] much better quality of data,” Russ explains.
According to Russ, distributing information correctly while minimizing distraction, understanding the root cause of issues when they occur, and being proactive in their resolution are integral to a successful solution. “Being able to understand the scope of the issue in terms of how widespread the problem is…the impact on the services that have been delivered, and also being able to prompt for root cause [is necessary so] not only do we know who’s affected [and] why…but we also understand where the problem actually resulted or originated,” he says.
“Today, teams behave in reactive model where, when they find something broken, they…go and look for the data that supports that. I think we actually need to switch that on its head, [so] the systems that are involved in service assurance are pushing the right information to the right users at the right time.”
Listen to the full podcast to gain more insight into the evolution of modern autonomous networks and learn how CSPs are addressing the challenges of evolving to full network automation.
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These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC’s position, strategies, or opinion.
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