How relevant are infrastructure management solutions to service providers in the era of Cloud services? The short answer is “very”, but that would make a very short article, says Suhela Dighe, Marketing Director EMEA, EMC Ionix.
The telecoms and service provider sector is once again at the forefront of technological change, all driven by new business and consumption models. Fixed, mobile and managed service providers (MSP) alike stand to gain from the offering IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), as well as consumer services such as IPTV and enterprise services, such as Cloud computing.
Telecoms service providers are well placed to profit, as they have the skills and often the all-IP infrastructure in place to deliver high quality IP-based applications and services.
New services are essential to help all service providers overcome shrinking revenues and compete effectively. Telecoms providers, in particular, need to look to new services to bolster their legacy network income. But launching new services is a resource-intensive activity and network operations centres (NOC) have to balance the business demand for new services with their own shrinking budgets. For example, there is a major opportunity for telcos to sell managed security services along with network connectivity to their customers’ branch sites where there are few in-house IT or security skills.
Unfortunately these opportunities come at a price. The problem is one of complexity: as the network has become more dynamic, service providers have seen their management challenge increase exponentially. There are more devices, more vendors and more technologies to manage. Instead of developing new products, the NOC team often spends all of their time fire-fighting network problems. In fact in our experience of working with operators, around 70% of budget is spent on maintenance and only 30% on launching new services.
Ultimately though, telecoms and service providers are businesses and as such the technologies they use to solve their network management challenges is irrelevant unless it helps them on the revenue side.
However, this is nothing new as businesses across all industries have been struggling with the challenges of managing distributed, complex and even virtual IT infrastructures for decades.
There are five things service providers – just like all organisations - need to do to overcome the challenges of managing their ever-expanding, ever more complex IT infrastructures. These include:
Eliminating errors
Automated infrastructure management processes allow service providers to remove the manual process from their day-to-day activities, as they are both error-prone and time-consuming. It helps them to eliminate the cost of manually making the relationships between components on network and entire service infrastructure, including servers, applications and storage. This becomes even more important within a growing and highly dynamic infrastructure. Automation can save up to 70% of the time to isolate problems, and these resources can then be redeployed from fire-fighting to supporting the business.
Accelerating infrastructure management
By automating infrastructure discovery and problem identification, service providers can reduce the length of many management tasks by up to 90%. Having a holistic approach to discovery, configuration management and fault management dramatically speeds up finding and fixing problems on the infrastructure. And by being able to execute day-by-day changes on the infrastructure, service providers are able to deliver new services much more quickly and easily.
Optimising infrastructure
Service providers are able to optimise their infrastructure by avoiding unnecessary outages and service downtime due to mis-configurations and unplanned changes in their environment. Manual change management causes 85% of problems on the infrastructure, so it is essential to prevent configuration errors, such as mistyping or interoperability issues by validating changes before execution. In addition, this allows them to run ‘what-if’ scenarios to understand what impact a particular configuration changes might have on the infrastructure.
Consolidating silos and tools
By having a management platform that can work across silos, service providers are able to consolidate toolsets for server, network, storage, and application configurations to avoid finger pointing and a swivel-chair management style. Proactive fault management allows benchmarking of normal network behaviour so that action can be taken if it deviates from the norm. In addition the information will be useful to help different entities within the service provider collaborate together, see their impact on each other and make support handover easier.
Ensuring compliance with internal and external regulations
Finally, automated configuration checking will allow the service provider to ensure that their infrastructure is in compliance with both their own IT policies but also with regulations such as PCI, HIPAA, & SOX. It will allow them to improve security by having automatic policy compliance, such as enforced password changes and run regular audits on the fly to prove compliance.
The opportunity is clearly present for service providers to grasp. Cloud computing gives them the ability to develop new service delivery models that match demands from the business community, and applications which can be served up over any access network, in a secure and easy-to-use manner, that are optimised for mobility.
Businesses, which gain a productivity or customer service advantage over competitors from using Cloud computing, will likely adapt their business processes to it for the long term. Because Cloud computing allows service providers to improve infrastructure utilisation and cut power consumption, it improves the economics for both service providers and their customers.
Many service providers already have the key components in place: the network infrastructure, relationship with enterprises, and the billing and roaming knowledge that will play an essential role in Cloud business models. Predictions for the Cloud computing market vary widely. At the conservative end, IDC predicts the market will be worth $44 billion in 2013, but a number of other analysts have pegged the market much higher. This variation in market sizing is partly due to the difficulty of defining what Cloud computing represents, but there is little doubt that there is plenty of market potential for software, platform and infrastructure as a service.
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