Accedian, a provider of performance analytics and end-user experience solutions, has announced new intent-based assurance capabilities built into the Skylight platform. This innovation represents the next level of automated assurance, making Skylight the first platform to offer these capabilities on the market. Intent-based assurance provides the foundational visibility needed to drive intent-based networking and enable critical insights into network performance.
One of the biggest challenges for communications service providers (CSPs) is the complexity of today’s networks and the stack-upon-stack of legacy systems, domains, and silos that don’t talk to one other. This isn’t sustainable with dynamic 5G services that have stringent performance requirements, nor with disaggregated cloud-native networks. Intent-based networking has tended to focus on service activation: configuring and provisioning devices based on intent. Intent-based networking, orchestration, end-to-end assurance, and service visibility need to go hand-in-hand.
With Skylight intent-based assurance, CSPs gain advantages, including:
- Direct visibility into service quality and user experience without the operational complexity of having to provision the behind-the-scenes details of assurance/testing.
- Increased intelligence in assurance – Skylight’s intent-based assurance capability understands how the service should behave. It can understand when the service is having an issue or may potentially have an issue in the future (predictive) and immediately trigger the controller layer for closed-loop optimisation or remediation.
- Accelerated time to market for new services – Intent-based assurance understands how to instrument the network to assure a service without manual intervention. Adding assurance to the network is easier to automate and deploy efficiently, helping to speed up time to market for new, performance-assured services.
- Cost savings – Proactively address issues and rapidly determine the root cause of performance degradations, reducing the operational cost of running increasingly complex networks.
Kevin Wollenweber, SVP/GM, Cisco networking data centre and provider connectivity, Cisco, says, “Ensuring consistent service quality requires more than simply knowing the status of equipment in the network. CSPs need visibility into end-to-end service quality, agility for assurance monitoring at the time of service deployment, and to move beyond simple SLA monitoring to predictive analytics. Our partnership with Accedian, adding Skylight’s intent-based assurance to Cisco’s Crosswork Network Automation portfolio, strengthens our joint efforts in helping CSPs to further elevate customer experience and drive efficiency in operations.
Dion Joannou, chief executive officer, Accedian, says, “Network complexity has accelerated beyond the manageability of manual intervention. Automation is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. It’s a journey that takes open integration, standardisation, and simplification work to get there. Intent-based assurance understands how the service should behave, and it can understand when the service is having an issue and inform the orchestration layer. This added intelligence will provide customers with the continuous visibility and feedback loop on service quality that they need.”
Roy Chua, founder and principal analyst, AvidThink, says, “The exploding number of network elements and connections that require management and maintenance show no sign of abating. Because of this, network managers and operators urgently need to improve manageability and increase scalability even as they try to rein in expenditures. Intent-based assurance adds value to today’s networks immediately.”
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