Why process automation is critical for service providers and ISPs

Due to surge in the demand for internet in COVID-19 pandemic time, most of the people operating from homes puts lot of pressure on service providers and ISPs to continuously upgrade the current infrastructure. The current challenges for ISPs are to keep pace in upgrading the infrastructure with the demand by ensuring network uptime and quality of services are not deteriorated.

Almost all ISPs are upgrading the infrastructure on fiber-to-home to improve the quality of network along with enhancing customer experience but the end-user connectivity, which is mostly mobiles, laptops, and tablets hooked on the Wi-Fi, still remain a challenge.

Today, every business is one poor user-experience away from a lost customer.

The complexity in building the networks with continuous change in architecture, and in handling the unprecedented traffic, has put lot of pressure on ISP NOC and IT staff.

ISPs face extraordinary circumstances when it comes to network and IT operations due to immense scale of the infrastructure and data they manage; new technologies are aggressively ramped up to remain competitive and meet customer demands.

A few of the challenges critical to service providers are :

• Managing network infrastructure complexity, including legacy networks, while rolling out complicated and demanding new technologies;
• Maintaining high levels of network connectivity and service uptime;
• Scaling customer with improved user experience;
• Contending with massive amounts of data being generated by the multiple domain-specific systems (NMS, EMS, CRM, OSS, AAA, other application systems, network elements) that have been deployed for alerting, monitoring, controlling, policies, connectivity, and routing;
• Quickly rolling out new services and infrastructure without increasing headcount to remain competitive; and
• Organizations are also contending with workforce fluctuations or in some cases reductions and tightening budgets, meaning that technical teams need to do more with less and workloads need to be left-shifted.

To address these challenges, network operations teams must embrace new technologies and advance their use of automation and AI. Manual processes simply cannot keep pace with the evolution, complexity, and rapid change in modern networks. The more processes you automate, the more value you will reap from your automation platform.

Service providers are in a dire need to build a collaborative AI tech platform to integrate all the domain-specific process, driven in silos to reduce the false positives. Building of alert correlation to help in identifying the root cause, without having the tech go to multiple tools, is the key to scale for any service provider.

This collaborative platform will enhance decision making across information and operational personas by contextualizing large volumes of operational data, and will improve analysis and insights across the networks and customers, in addition to proposing augmenting network and IT service management and automation.

Service providers must undertake digital transformation as they no longer have the luxury of responding to re-occurring of issues as multiple choices exist for the customers. Instead, they must become proactive to address potential issues before they impact user experience.