Breaking Down the Barriers Between IT & Network
By James Crawshaw – “Digital transformation” initiatives in the telecom sector generally fall into one of three key categories: customer engagement, new services, and operational agility. The first category is all about meeting customer expectations for ease of ordering, delivery and problem resolution – for today’s existing services.
The second category is about finding new sources of revenue either by becoming aggregators of third-party content and services (platform companies), or by enabling internal innovation through the adoption of DevOps and a fast-fail mentality.
The third category may be less sexy, but it is no less important. Increased agility of network and IT operations through greater automation not only has potentially significant cost saving benefits, it is also an enabler of the better customer experience and faster time-to-market that underpin the first two transformation categories.
One of the great challenges with automation in the telecom industry is that the networking and IT domains remain heavily siloed in many service providers today with hundreds or even thousands of manual processes required to map data from Operation Support Systems (planning, fulfillment, assurance, etc.) to network management and orchestration systems.
Not only does this lead to a lot of “swivel-chair” operations to bridge the gap but fragmented data systems reduce the visibility into real-time service and network state.
The quick fix is to over-provision network resources to cope with this lack of visibility but that leads to unnecessarily high capex in addition to the opex overhead associated with highly manual operations. more>
Related>
- Digital disruption: how it’s impacting regional service providers, Francisco Sant’Anna
- The practical road to intelligent automation, Frank O. Miller
By Marie Fiala – Do we need perfect data? Or is ‘good enough’ data good enough? Certainly, there is a need to find a pragmatic approach or else one could get stalled in analysis-paralysis. Is closed-loop automation the end goal? Or is human-guided open loop automation desired? If the quality of data defines the quality of the process, then for closed-loop automation of critical business processes, one needs near-perfect data. Is that achievable?
By Kent Jordan – The photonic layer is the foundation for high capacity networks. Whether the network application is to increase connectivity between data centers, deliver bandwidth-intensive content, or to move business applications into the cloud, the photonic layer provides the mechanism to efficiently light the fiber by assigning and routing wavelengths across the optical spectrum. However, today’s photonic layer systems utilize only a portion of the usable spectrum within the fiber, and operators are increasingly looking at expansion into the L-band to increase capacity.
By Darren McKinney – The Light Reading CNG 2019 event was chock full of excellent speakers – lots of very interesting presentations, panels, and fireside chats.
By Atura Bavisi – Businesses today are constantly changing, often in unique and different ways due to market-specific conditions, but they all share something in common: a complex network environment. Operators are always looking for ways to optimize their network, at once reducing complexity while adding flexibility to handle the rapidly growing traffic demands.
By Paulina Gomez – Technology innovation – the continued evolution of cloud computing, the rapid increase in Internet of Things (IoT) and the growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) – is expected to drive a 100x increase in connected devices and a 1,000x increase in data traffic by 2020 (2016 Mobility Report, November 2016, Ericsson). Each new device doesn’t just drive traffic, it also dramatically expands the network attack surface – increasing the opportunity of cybercriminals to leverage sophisticated methods to exploit these opportunities.
By Wayne Hickey – Streaming applications like Amazon Prime, Facebook, Netflix, and YouTube (… and the list goes on) are consuming Internet content at a torrid pace with the end nowhere in sight. To adjust to the high-speed pace of today’s business, enterprises use technology to change what they do and how they do it. Think about healthcare, hospitality, financial, manufacturing, and education organizations, to name a few—all are taking advantage of digital transformation to push more and more data.
