The importance of service assurance for NFV deployments
So far, 2015 has been a big year for network functions virtualization. A recent report from IHS suggests this sector is set to grow five-fold by 2019 as operators look to shift from hardware to software environments. Yet, even at this early stage, the market is predicted to be worth $2.3 billion, with operators already making significant investments into servers, storage, software and the other associated technologies needed to make the promise of a virtualized network environment a reality. Unsurprisingly, NFV has become a key part of the roadmap for mobile success in the near term, particularly in the face of increased competition from over-the-top and app-based players. However, like any major change in the telecom space, the move toward NFV is not without risk. In order to ensure those risks do not outweigh the rewards of a virtualized environment, operators need to put one major consideration at the forefront of their planning efforts – service assurance.
The aforementioned IHS report suggests there are two key drivers behind the operator-led shift away from a physical hardware environment. The use of virtualized software to grow revenue was one, with the opportunity to significantly improve operational efficiency being the other. However, while these two points are intrinsically linked in terms of vastly improving the operator bottom line, they also share the same pain point in terms of their potential to cause service disruption.
While much has already been said about the benefits of NFV for operators and the impact it will have in terms of managing the mobile experience, few have considered the implications for the end user or, crucially, the enterprise customer. NFV’s biggest benefit in this regard is also its Achilles’ heel in terms of managing the subscriber experience. The increased agility offered by a virtualized network environment means the mobile network can be adapted and new services added in minutes rather than days. Yet, unsurprisingly, this increases the potential for disruption to occur.
The transition to NFV is therefore a double-edged sword. Although the ability to deploy new applications much quicker than before – presenting a range of opportunities for an operator’s enterprise customers in its own right – has the potential to significantly improve the user experience, it could also lead to a much greater chance of churn or reputation damage if the operator delivers anything less than stellar performance.
With this in mind, operators must continue to deliver on expected levels of reliability, even while they look to completely redesign the network environment. There’s no margin for error and they won’t be able to sacrifice performance when moving to a virtualized network. The challenge, therefore, is to optimize the performance of a software-defined network environment. Working with the right service assurance provider will become a necessity to help operators capitalize on the valuable commercial drivers behind NFV without damaging their bottom lines in the process. By doing so, they will be able to preempt service issues or network degradation by constantly monitoring and adapting network performance in real time, extending the role of service assurance beyond troubleshooting and issue prevention to an end-to-end resource management capability.
An added complication with a virtualized approach is that the silos between equipment providers will be broken down and there will be a mixture of different supplier environments. Adopting a common practice or approach won’t happen overnight, so operators absolutely must approach network performance in the right way and put it at the forefront of their migration to NFV strategy to avoid opening themselves up to potential issues down the line. Equally, the transition itself between a hardware- and software-based network won’t take place all at once. There will be an extended period in which both the physical and virtualized environments will need to operate side by side, which further emphasizes the need to have the right tools in place to help simplify the transition.
With reports suggesting all major U.S. operators are either already deploying NFV or plan to do so within the next few years, it’s clear that virtualization will have an incredibly important role to play in the future of mobile network design. Migration to a virtualized environment will continue to be a gradual process, but now there’s universal recognition that NFV will lead to a fundamental change in telecom architecture and will deliver a range of benefits from increased service agility to new revenue. However, to truly capitalize on this opportunity and make it a reality, operators first need to make sure they adopt the right approach to service assurance.
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