People and business are more dependent today on broadband than ever. As telecom services take on this new level of responsibility, they are also transforming to far more complex and dynamic technology platforms, like software-defined networks and cloud-native IT; this sharp rise in complexity necessitates substantial network and operations automation.
Vital services require automation
Broadband is now considered a vital service because other lifeline services, like power and supply chains, rely on it for their own function. Similarly, people are more dependent today on broadband to participate in society, including work, education, healthcare and communication. “Internet is a basic human right, like you and I have the right to drink water,” said Tareq Amin, Group Chief Technology Officer, Rakuten during his closing keynote for FutureNet World on April 21. But as telecom services take on this new level of responsibility, they are also transforming to far more complex and dynamic technology platforms, like software-define networks and cloud-native IT. This sharp rise in complexity necessitates substantial network and operations automation.
Read the latest report from TM Forum Orchestrating broadband as a vital utility.
“The future is automation,” said Neil McRae, Managing Director and Chief Architect, BT to the FutureNet World audience. “If you run into advanced applications and life or death services, we can’t have the network react by human intervention – it’s got to be instantaneous,” McRae says. Automation is necessary to overcome the complexity inherent in orchestrating and assuring critical services over dynamically scalable, virtualized networks that provide as much raw capability at the edge as they do in the core. Network operations will need greater automation to fill a range of needs inherent to critical services:
While a culture that embraces failure may sound counterintuitive, proponents of AIOps, ML, and continuous improvement (CI) find failure informative in building predictive models. Service assurance engineers may use anything out of the ordinary that happens in the network as a new use case, monitor for it, and aim to respond preventively to it in a zero-touch fashion. Over time, use cases and fixes are refined to improve a CSPs ability to predict and prevent service degradations before they occur and provide critical services the 100% uptime and resiliency they require. For a closer look at how CSPs are automating network and service operations to support critical B2B services, read the latest report from TM Forum Orchestrating broadband as a vital utility.