Digitization of the network is reshaping the telecom landscape as customer data consumption habits change thanks to new, disruptive technologies. We’ve gone from a LAN connection on a desktop in your home to a cellular device in your pocket, and regular customers expect to access content whenever and wherever they are. This means that service providers are in trouble if they can’t adjust. They must find a solution that will keep the network healthy and adopt new technologies suited to today’s demands.
Today’s Network Operations Center (NOC) monitors the entirety of a network, actively working to keep everything healthy. However, it’s fundamentally reactive, with thousands of alarms piling up each day for operators to sift through. Current operations are handled manually, creating difficulties when trying to onboard new technologies. Digitizing the NOC to meet customers’ demands requires automation that will turn its reactive nature into a proactive one.
To ensure the health of a network, service providers need a service assurance solution capable of providing fault and performance management, as well as closed-loop automation. Fault and performance management uses monitoring, root-cause analysis, and visualization to proactively identify and notify operators of potential problems in the network before a customer can experience them. Providing closed-loop automation, a service assurance platform continuously collects, analyzes, and acts on data gathered from the network. When combined with machine learning, a service assurance platform becomes an essential part of the NOC. Altogether, a service assurance platform can cut the number of alarms by 50%, a significant reduction considering that a provider may collect close a million alarms each month.
A targeted network management solution provides an accessible path for network migration. While legacy equipment is guaranteed to work, it may not be the best fit for digitization. Integrating a targeted network management solution into your NOC helps bridge the gap between new technologies and vendors with legacy equipment. It supports a multivendor environment, allowing the NOC to manage both new and legacy equipment from different vendors in the same ecosystem. As well, targeted network management enables service providers to bring new services to market twenty times faster due to significant improvements made to the onboarding of new technologies and vendors into the network.
An automated NOC that contains both service assurance and targeted network management provides a network perfectly suited for the changing digital landscape. Service assurance helps keep the network up and running by identifying critical issues so that no matter where or how users access the network, they will be provided with a seamless experience. Targeted network management helps quickly onboard new technologies and vendors that will help push towards digitalization. Combined in a 24x7x365 NOC, service providers are prepared for whenever, wherever, and however, a customer chooses to interact with the network.
For a customer or business, the advantages of an automated NOC are exceptional. Customers don’t have to worry about any issues regarding the accessing of data from any device, anywhere or at any time of day. For businesses, the proactive nature of service assurance and the simple network migration of targeted network management helps ease operating expenses and mean-time-to-repair. Digitization isn’t slowing down for anyone, and service providers offer a way to hop on the train.