Intent-based assurance helps get B2B services to market quickly — and then keeps them working flawlessly

Time is money — for you and your enterprise customers. That’s why intent-based assurance is worth considering for communications service providers (CSPs), especially those that want to use network reliability, service quality, and user experience as market differentiators. 

The foundation for intent-based assurance is intent-based networking, where all the complexities of implementing services are abstracted behind intent-based APIs. This frees engineering and operations teams from time-consuming grunt work such as learning and using network protocols every time they need to deploy a service. Instead, they simply describe what the service does and the required performance level (service level objective), and it’s up to the system to configure the network to make that reality.

Historically, service assurance was figured out after deploying network and service architecture. Now, with intent-based networking, assurance becomes part of the service delivery lifecycle and happens at service design when you also specify the assurance infrastructure needed – in one motion. Likewise if the service definition changes, the assurance automatically adapts as an integral part of the provisioning of revenue-generating services. This is not only more efficient in terms of operations costs but provides much better resolution to real-time end customer experience degradation.

Meet demanding B2B network services SLAs

Intent-based assurance enables operations teams to deploy assurance easily and efficiently when provisioning a wide variety of B2B network services, such as Layer 3 VPNs and SD-WANs. As a result, B2B product managers and sales teams get new services to market faster, which means they start driving revenue sooner. Rapid rollouts of innovative services also help CSPs sign up enterprise customers ahead of their slower-moving rivals.

User experience is more than just the status of the equipment in the network. The network can be up with all lights green and yet users are complaining of a poor experience

Another way that intent-based assurance helps CSPs stand out from the pack is by helping them meet enterprises’  business outcomes with high availability and performance SLAs. It provides operations teams with the end-to-end visibility into both networks and services that they need to quickly ferret out problems, such as congestion or packet loss latency. To monitor SLAs for a range of services, carrier-grade monitoring and assurance has to be highly granular and precise with the ability to scale to handle the traffic volume, diversity of service KPIs, and complexity of a multi-vendor service provider network.

Future telco services will require high levels of automation in operations

In a 2022 TM Forum survey, two-thirds of CSP respondents said that automation in network and IT operations would be fundamentally important to their ability to generate new revenue and new lines of business from their network.

Omdia Senior Analyst, Christoforos Sarantopoulos, concurs “To achieve closed-loop automation (the holy grail of next-generation network operations) service assurance will need to become the control loop at every layer of the service model.“ 

Anticipating CSP demand for intent-based assurance and network automation, Accedian Skylight’s intent-based assurance is fully integrated with Cisco’s Crosswork™ Network Automation platform. 

Intent-based assurance becomes part of the service lifecycle and an autonomous closed-loop system that adapts to potential service degradation or any potentially user-impacting trends or behavior and drives auto-remediation. 

To support intent-based assurance, Cisco’s Crosswork Network Automation platform has three main sets of capabilities:

• Uses an input model that describes a service and knows how to instrument the network to provide assurance for the service and automates the placement, deployment, and configuration of the instrumentation provided by Accedian Skylight sensors
• Understands how a service should behave, creates the KPI metrics relevant to maintaining appropriate QoS (Service Level Intent – SLO), tracks those metrics, detects when the service has an issue, and informs the Crosswork Network Controller to trigger remedial action and optimization
• APIs for provisioning intent-based assurance are fully integrated with the Crosswork Network Controller for streaming data and alerts

Finally, CSPs also can use intent-based assurance as a major step closer to their ultimate goal: fully autonomous networks that can identify and resolve problems at millisecond speeds — before B2B end-users notice and before they impact business-critical applications and services.

To learn more about intent–based assurance, download the Appledore Research: Intent-Based Networking ‘Automated Assurance’s critical success factor’ or download the intent-based assurance solution review. We will also be showcasing the joint solution at the following upcoming event:

• Cisco Live in Las Vegas, June 4-8 – register here