Prescribing Proactive Network Health Care for Enterprise Customers

In the quest to turn quality into a key component for distinguishing network services for business customers, preventative medicine is emerging as a realistic problem solver.

Enterprise business services offer a real opportunity for service providers to gain accelerated return on their next-generation network investment, and features that are sensitive to QoS throughout the broadband-built infrastructures are ideal for leveraging feature-rich business-facing portfolios.

Before service providers can take advantage of this opportunity, though, certain questions must be addressed. How can they offer a realistic differentiation in their enterprise-facing products? How can they persuade business service customers to migrate to a service based on a next-generation infrastructure? And how can they ensure levels of customer service are improved — not compromised — by the migration?

Here’s how. On the surface, most service providers offer similar business services portfolios: VPN, VoIP, network-based security solutions, Ethernet, mobility and more. These portfolios are not restricted to wireline operators. Cable MSOs now are making a significant challenge to the previously incumbent position in this lucrative market, driven by traditional telcos’ encroachment on their residential entertainment space.

In order to gain a competitive edge in this growing market, providers are looking to bundle their feature-rich services creatively. And proactive service-assurance techniques, customer reporting and service-centric SLAs are emerging as key points of differentiation that they can leverage.

Revenue from high-end business portfolios clearly will prove to be lucrative for service providers, but only for as long as enterprise users remain faithful to their provider and service-level rebates do not affect their bottom-line operating profits.

A simplistic view of SLA violations is, "If you don’t give me what I paid for — you pay." However, in reality, enterprises just want to concentrate on their core business, be it finance, health care, manufacturing, etc. So rebates have no real significance to the IT manager and end users; they just want their services available all of the time with a high quality of experience.

The business reality is that end users only will suffer one or two outages that are core-business-effecting before they start shopping around for a more reliable service and an operator with equivalent or better guarantees of service. This is a competitive market and it doesn’t take long before customer churn becomes a reality.

So service providers recognize the need to do everything possible to ensure a consistent and predictable level of service for their enterprise customers. The best way to achieve this is by concentrating on the methods they employ for service assurance within their OSS.

Evolving Service Assurance

A conventional focus for applied service assurance is in the resolution of problems identified by a series of notifications (or traps), sent from single or numerous elements in the network. These inform operators of equipment and connection status, but only related to that specific element, port or connection. Some form of manual correlation or fault management application then would display fuller detail and allow further investigation into the problem.

Although an essential component in the assurance process, information from traps is generally resource-centric and, in many cases, not related to a service-management perspective. Traditional fault-management capabilities have been enhanced to aid in rapid reaction to a service outage, but it is still like closing the gate after the horse has bolted. Today’s service providers cannot offer premium business services with assurance based solely on fault management, so performance reporting is used to offer an additional layer of information based on real-time connectivity and quality of data delivery.

The key is to evolve from a reactive response to network faults as they occur, to ensuring network managers have maximum visibility into service performance in order to prevent problems before they occur.

As it is with a well-conceived health care model that emphasizes preventative, primary care over tertiary care that treats people only after they become sick, it is less expensive in the long run to avoid problems altogether.

Proactive Service Assurance

The concept of proactive service assurance emphasizes a blurring of the lines between traditional fault and performance management. It implies the ability to anticipate and resolve issues before they impact service-level performance; ensures optimal performance of critical, customer- or user-facing services; and provides the tools and processes for operations staff to resolve problems before they affect end users.

Key to its delivery is the ability to use a combination of real-time and historical performance data to create accurate predictions of normal user behavior to form usage trends. These then can be leveraged with advanced analytics to track usage and alert support staff based on abnormal patterns.

These analytics ensure that operation teams efficiently can provide preemptive care of user services, which helps to minimize potential SLA violations and improve end-user perception of the service, leading to improved customer care and satisfaction.

A further benefit to taking the proactive approach to service assurance comes with identification of performance issues related to congestion and data loss. Many networks worldwide have sufficient bandwidth to cope with the expected usage patterns, but most have been built based on best-effort delivery of service. Today’s focus on QoS now means that guarantees are being placed upon specific data types, typically high-priority, mission-critical data and VoIP quality. Therefore, understanding real-time utilization and future capacity impacts based on usage trends is vital to keeping network and resources at peak operating condition.

Targeting Customer Impact

Another more basic feature provided by this evolved look at performance management is service-centricity. It may seem fundamental that automated event-to-service correlation is necessary for operational efficiency, but many still rely on manual processes to link failures or performance issues in the network to the actual impacted end users. Proactive service assurance includes in-depth service-level management and visibility into the cross-silo, multivendor and multidomain environment that supports complex, next-generation services spanning the network.

For high-level QoE, it is essential to remember that a superior end-to-end service is only as good as its weakest link. If any of those links drop below expected levels of performance, you should get instant notification of its location, which predefined performance thresholds have been crossed, and, most critically, which users are affected. To maintain efficiency, this notification and correlation should be at the operations level directly and not have to rely on lengthy customer database correlation processes. That way responsiveness is improved and additional levels of the operations organization are bought closer to the customer.

Radiating Confidence in the Portfolio

Proactive service assurance has set the scene for improved, efficient operations and user-problem resolution or prevention, but now there is an opportunity to convey the confidence that providers have in their services to help attract new customers and enrich the experience of existing users.

Customer reporting enables service providers to enrich their outward-facing portal for CRM with reports on the services to which customers have subscribed. It leverages problem resolution, capacity planning and service-level management solutions, to tailor the visibility customers need for their offered services.

From the perspective of a business services user, the IT manager within the enterprise has an increased level of empowerment — meaning that if enterprise end-application users are experiencing problems, they have immediate ability to determine if the problem is related to the level of service they are getting from their service provider or whether it is related to an internal LAN issue.

At this point, the IT manager can employ application-centric networking probe measurement techniques to identify the cause and location of the problem. This emphasizes how WAN and LAN performance applications, coupled with a comprehensive and informative portal, can work hand in hand to deliver comprehensive service and application assurance.

As companies look to expand the use of virtualization to more mission-critical applications and services, attention will shift to the challenge of how to manage the increased complexity that virtualization introduces.

Companies will focus on real-time tools that can proactively address ever-changing capacity requirements. They will look for ways to integrate virtual machine monitoring into the larger server and network management architecture, and start to see the need for a unified management framework.

Application performance will take center stage in enterprise IT as organizations fully embrace application performance and assurance strategies. Enterprises will see a real need for application-centric network visibility.

Application monitoring capabilities will continue to be important, particularly those looking to improve internal operations and for service providers looking to expand their catalog into managed services.

Source: InfoVista