Network automation is a nascent trend for service providers that can play a key role in delivering business-critical uptime to enterprise customers. This technology can have downstream productivity impacts for service providers’ network engineers, too.
For customers, automation is helping to optimize the network and resolve network issues more quickly, oftentimes before impacts reach the end user. For employees, automation helps them take on more meaningful tasks, such as improving the customer experience.
As we’ve grown our network, we have also made significant headway in integrating automation that makes the network smarter. Think machine learning and AI. As a result, we have seen tangible results in the following real-world scenarios:
- The software detects a major network outage within one of our upstream peers and reroutes traffic around the outage within milliseconds, preserving invaluable uptime for our customers. This allows us to offer highly competitive service level agreements (SLAs).
- Scenario planning is enhanced in that our intelligent network tools and artificial intelligence (AI) are activated to “learn” how engineering leaders would respond to certain scenarios — and then conducting the task automatically. It is quite the game-changer.
- The network is constantly crawled to identify routes with the lowest latency, fewest number of hops and least jitter. Traffic is then deployed automatically along that path.
- Simulated failover scenarios can be conducted in real-time to determine the trickle-down effect if a particular node fails, as opposed to waiting for a maintenance window to tackle this task.
- Engineering now has increased visibility into the network to solve potential problems before they occur. While it may sound ironic, we’ve found that deploying automation actually increases the sense of command of the network our engineers are able to feel.
- Our engineers can offload rote tasks that are often subject to human error. And this enables them to focus on delivering the best customer experience possible. Not only are issues and errors such as poor data entry avoided, but we’ve seen increased employee satisfaction.
These benefits are all achievable with network automation, assisting us to deliver a VIP customer experience to our customers.
Want to learn more about automation, and the benefits for both service providers and enterprise customers? Our CTO digs deep into this topic in Pipeline Magazine here.