Today’s organizations are operating in a very Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) business environment. Like the saying goes “If you keep doing what you have been doing, you will keep getting what you have been getting”. To stay relevant and competitive in this VUCA world, businesses need to jump the curve by evolving continuously and rapidly. The key aspect of such an evolution is end-to-end flexibility to accommodate future advancements and unexpected changes.
Network is the backbone of any organization that uses technology in its day-to-day operations. It is the most critical component when it comes to implementing changes in the software or hardware ecosystems. It is as important as the nervous system of a human body. Hence, for a business to evolve, the end-to-end flexibility of networks becomes a primary aspect.
IoT is making steady inroads in multiple business areas. Hence, 50 billion additional devices are expected to be connected to the worldwide network by 2025[1]. This is expected to boost the network automation market, which is expected to rise at a CAGR of 50% in the same period[2]. These changing technology trends emphasize the need for flexible and smart networks to fulfill the present needs and adopt to the future needs.
Network DevOps offers this end-to-end flexibility combined with speed, agility, quality and scalability. Many organizations have started focusing on enhancing their network capabilities using Network DevOps to redefine business processes, provide high quality value added services to customers in a short span of time to generate more revenue. Network DevOps ensures that the organization is flexible enough to accommodate future digital advancements, thereby ensuring continuous revenue growth.
What is Network DevOps?
Amazon Web Services defines DevOps as the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace as compared to organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market[3].
Figure 1.0: DevOps representation
Network flexibility enables organizations to roll out new services faster, thereby boosting customer delight which results in accelerated revenue growth.
Network DevOps solution redefines the different phases of the network lifecycle—Define, Design, Deploy, Monitor and Optimize—by adopting a DevOps (Development + Operations) based approach. This helps in improving the value of networks in an era of Cloud, SDN, NFV and IoT, with features such as rapid provisioning, traffic shaping, proactive monitoring, threat hunting, continuous improvement and self-healing.
Benefits of Network DevOps
When a mobile subscriber experiences an issue with a network in a crowded place like a stadium or concert venue, which degrades the quality of service (QOS) and customer experience (CEX), his/her expectation is to have a quick resolution to enable the individual to share the joy of watching a match or concert with friends and family. A notification will be sent to the customer when the issue is detected and a post-resolution notification will be sent to the customer once it is resolved. It will have a positive impact on the customer satisfaction score.
Network DevOps makes this possible with its proactive monitoring and advanced AI capabilities (Figure 2.0). It not only analyzes the present, but also learns from the past and updates itself for future challenges. The self-healing capability makes it even more efficient since problem resolution happens in seconds without any manual intervention.
Figure 2.0: Network DevOps – Proactive monitoring and Machine Learning
The intent-based networking capability also makes traffic shaping easier and smarter as compared to the manual approach. This comes in handy in enterprise scenarios like analyst briefing, corporate event broadcasting and critical project go–live, and in B2C use cases like live internet streaming, HD video calling, etc.
The rapid provisioning is useful in onboarding customers at a faster pace especially in enterprise scenarios where customers need to be transitioned to cloud. The pace of onboarding followed by the delight of intent-based networking, proactive monitoring and machine learning will result in high customer delight.
The network’s flexibility helps offer the most efficient performance in the present and also be future ready. This flexibility is critical in the advent of technology boom in areas like 5G, IoT, blockchain and artificial intelligence, which are expected to be mainstream by 2020 [4].
Conclusion
The benefits of implementing Network DevOps extends beyond the enterprise network providers and telecommunication companies. CXOs across
the industry verticals are looking to implement Network DevOps to ensure high quality of both service and experience to their end customers.
This is a potential differentiator that helps them retain existing customers and gain more new customers, ensuring continuous revenue growth. Certain businesses like online content providers are using Network DevOps to disrupt the market and thus gain the first-mover advantage in unexplored business areas.
References
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/471264/iot-number-of-connected-devices-worldwide/
[2] https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/network-automation-market-156261086.html
[3] https://aws.amazon.com/devops/
[4] https://appinventiv.com/blog/10-tech-trends-that-will-become-mainstream-by-2020
Raghul Shyam Ravi
Product Consultant,
IP & Innovation, Wipro Limited
Rajesh Kumar Sao
Product Consultant,
IP & Innovation, Wipro Limited
Raghul Shyam Ravi and Rajesh Kumar Sao are handpicked experts of Wipro’s Innovation & IP team that comprises seasoned product managers and solution architects, as well as product engineering specialists, that create or curate new IP-based solutions across Wipro, leveraging organization capability and experience
Both Raghul and Rajesh have significant experience in crafting IP-based solution proposals for telcos and other enterprises, addressing the needs of next-generation network services.
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