Four Reasons Why Assurance Is More Critical Than Ever

Figure 1: Future networks with intent-based, zero-touch service assurance
Source: McKinsey

3. They want it all, and they want it now

Customer demands are also increasing—they want it now, they want it hyperpersonalized, and they want it functioning perfectly. We are in the age of more—more new services, more innovative services, more bandwidth, more instant service, but hey, also, how about less cost?

Technology has changed the definition of “fast,” and as we say, “slow is the new down.” The evolution of consumer tastes and demands can indeed cause challenges for businesses, but also great opportunities.

Quality of experience (QoE) is a key driver for customer loyalty and assuring services now means assuring a customer experience. With the right technology in place, there is no reason a service provider cannot meet and exceed customer expectations.

The proof is in the granularity of visibility. Moving in real time requires real-time visibility and granular data that allows rapid change, improvements, and innovation. With Provider Connectivity Assurance’s microsecond-level accuracy and millisecond precision, control over service experience in a fast-moving 5G environment is well in hand.

Another new battlefield for customer experience? Self-service. Provider Connectivity Assurance’s real-time end-customer portals, providing transparency on the experience and service levels that they are receiving from their provider, allow you to check the box for service differentiation, for personalized, self-service management, and for fully capitalizing on cloud-native architectures. Additionally, real-time performance data can be used to proactively upsell existing clients facing service exhaust, all through their own (the end client’s) performance portal.

4. Assurance is absolutely foundational for closed-loop automation

A few years ago, we saw the signs. We saw how service providers and mobile operators would move towards network as a service (NaaS), with complex multivendor, multidomain, multicloud environments that had multiple operators in the loop. Too many multis—we like to call it the “massive multi.”

All those years ago, we saw how a SaaS-first performance analytics and monitoring solution, an intent-based service assurance platform with full-stack and granular visibility, would be an integral part of any next-generation network looking to automate beyond the use of automotives for drive testing.

As Patrick Kelly, Principal Analyst at Appledore Research, writes in the recent white paper, Intent-Based Networking – Automated Assurance’s Critical Success Factor, “Our focus on assurance is a deeply held belief that you can’t automate what you can’t measure, and you can’t measure what you can’t see or observe. Automated assurance is not an independent system. It is a collection of key technology assets that allows operators to process massive streams of telemetry data in near real time and extract a signal from the noise. This requires applied knowledge of the different technology domains and a full view up and down the 7 layers of the protocol stack.”

The listeners in the audience experience the concert, not just the percussionist who hasn’t missed a beat

Assurance of digital experiences is about all the orchestra sections working together, in sync, and without missing a beat. It is about ensuring that everyone stays on time, plays within their note thresholds, and delivers to the audience, the end users of the performance (credit on the metaphor belongs to Mark Leary from IDC, by the way).

Now that Provider Connectivity Assurance’s intent-based, zero-touch service assurance is a key component of the Cisco Service Assurance portfolio, we are excited to be on the journey to becoming a leader in the assurance and user experience space.