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By Denise Lage

Service Assurance Helps CSPs Save Money, Make Money and Sleep Through the Night

If you’re a CTO, or managing Network Operations and Engineering teams at a communications service provider (CSP), what keeps you up at night? Meeting customer SLAs? Simplifying the operational complexity of 5G, the cloud, edge services, disaggregation and virtualization? Catching outages and other problems before customers notice? Keeping CapEx and OpEx at levels that won’t raise your CFO’s eyebrows?  

The answer is probably ‘all of the above’. For many CSPs, those challenges increasingly point to another answer: automated service assurance. 

“It’s clear that the shift to cloud- and edge-based services is really driving service providers to review their assurance strategies,” Jim Hodges, Heavy Reading Research Director for Cloud and Security, said in an April 28 webinar, “Making Automated Assurance a Reality, Accelerate Outcomes and Reduce Risk”, “Automated assurance is a key part of this because of all the opportunities.”

Figure 1 summarizes the major ways that service providers can use service assurance to both save and make money. They also can use it to differentiate themselves in the eyes of enterprises, government agencies and other organizations that are using their own service assurance tools to ensure that CSPs are meeting their contractual SLA requirements. 

Take 5G, for example. It was designed from the ground up to meet the market’s unique requirements, such as the Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) feature set with latencies as low as 1 millisecond. That makes 5G ideal for delay-sensitive, mission-critical applications such as factory automation.

But sophisticated 5G capabilities can’t live up to their potential if the rest of the network is having problems. Unless service providers can identify those problems as they’re emerging — before they affect service performance and before customers notice — they’ll lose enterprise customers when it comes to mission-critical IoT applications such as V2X, smart cities and Industry 4.0 time-sensitive networking.

The same risk applies to the consumer market. In fact, 32% of all customers worldwide would stop doing business with a brand they love after just a single bad experience, according to a PwC survey. Latin American consumers are even less tolerant: 49% say they’d churn after the first bad experience.

With today’s increasingly complex networks, it would take a small army of staff in the network operations center (NOC) and elsewhere to ferret out and fix every emerging problem. Even if your CFO approved a budget big enough to hire that many people, good luck finding enough qualified experts in today’s hyper-competitive market. 

Why Automated Service Assurance?

The aforementioned challenges are why so many CSPs are replacing their legacy performance- and fault-monitoring systems with automated service assurance platforms that provide end-to-end visibility and control, from the user edge through the network and into the cloud. 

One example of an operator moving to next-generation assurance solutions is Colt, which is now halfway through a three-year process of replacing all existing performance- and fault-monitoring systems. 

“You get unparalleled visibility over your entire ecosystem. You get untapped data access. Whereas systems before might have had a very proprietary data architecture, all of the vendors we’ve gone with are very open, often using REST APIs. We can grab and source that data. It becomes a real powerhouse in the future we want to get to.” – Colt Vice President of Network Operations, Shane Sura 

Another example – a leading regional mobile operator needed a single-pane-of-glass view of its network and service performance at a per-customer granularity. From the micro detail to the macro view of their network health and delivered service experience. The operator can now provide service assurance “as-a-service” with customer-specific dashboards and will monetize this capability while reducing internal costs by automating routine tasks.

“To stay competitive in today’s market, we needed the ability to proactively act on quality of experience issues and introduce more automation into our daily operations. That requires full visibility and deep, granular insight into the full reality of what’s happening in our networks. Our customers also need this type of granular visibility. Cisco and Accedian are helping us meet this need for our business, and we can also offer this as a service for our own customers. This is truly a win-win for us.” – Leading MEA mobile operator

Learn more about the use cases enabled by Accedian Skylight and the Cisco Crosswork™ Automation here.

Accedian Skylight and the Cisco Crosswork™ Automation platform

Together, Accedian Skylight and the Cisco Crosswork™ Automation platform show what’s happening in the network every millisecond, enabling service providers to identify issues quickly, and automate intervention to assure customer experience in real time. These capabilities are highly relevant to 5G standalone operations and delivering innovative new services.