The importance of a service assurance solution to operationalise SD-WAN technology – Part I

Anand Gonuguntla of Centina

SD-WAN is quickly becoming a significant disruptive growth engine for managed service providers. More and more enterprises are moving towards SD-WAN for their complex and dispersed networks, says Anand Gonuguntla, CEO of Centina, in an effort to reduce traditionally expensive operating costs. But the opportunity of this promising new virtual model needs to include a new level of focus on network performance and service assurance.

How can operators assure themselves and their business customers that the newly virtual networks will offer the same quality and performance as those of traditional WAN networks?

The answer lies in finding the right service assurance solution that can effectively monitor the health of virtual services in a disaggregated, virtual environment. The right assurance solution can support hybrid and virtual networks to identify and troubleshoot issues and be able to correlate those issues back to the impacted customers and services – before they impact network and infrastructure performance and business operations.

Here is a look at some key areas, operators and enterprises must consider when selecting the right service assurance solution for their new SD-WAN networks:

    • End-to-end visibility of the network – Does the solution provide a holistic view of the network?
    • Proactive monitoring and automated resolution  Will the solution find potential issues before they impact customers and resolve in advance of an event?
    • Automation and self-healing – Automation is key to securing virtual network environments. How flexible is your solution? Does it offer machine learning functions to learn and adapt to current conditions and pinpoint anomalies?
    • Quick and flexible access to analytics – Optimising your network will depend highly on the analytics you receive from your assurance solution. How helpful is the reporting?

In the migration to virtual network environments, the focus must be on quality and customer experience. An assurance solution that successfully addresses the above criteria will provide you confidence that service quality will be managed to defined SLAs. But what role does machine learning play in your network performance strategy? Part II of this blog will cover the importance of machine learning when assuring your hybrid-virtual network environment.

The author of this blog is Anand Gonuguntla, CEO of Centina

Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @VanillaPlus OR @jcvplus

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