4 OSS Capabilities Service Providers Need to Achieve Automation
Dynamic, real-time hybrid functions become table stakes as service providers pursue automation in complex environments.
Service design and provisioning in digital, DevOps-driven environments is becoming more complex. This is because the definition of inventory has changed significantly in the OSS domain. It now requires a unified, cross-domain and technology-agnostic view of both physical and logical resources and their interdependencies.
Here's a look at four OSS capabilities that service providers will need if they want to automate service fulfillment in multivendor physical, virtual or hybrid environments.
1. Live Topology Views
Optimizing customer experience with dynamic, digital services requires instant insight across constantly changing virtual resources. Service providers will need a live and dynamic topology view that can recognize which physical or virtual network infrastructure components are needed for each service and track which components tie into existing BSS/OSS.
2. Past, Present and Future Resource Visibility
Service providers will need visibility into past, present and future states of resources and services to achieve higher levels of automation. This is especially important as mobile and IP-centric service design and deployment accelerates and consumers become less patient with outages and performance disruptions.
3. Public and Private Cloud Service Management
Some workloads will live in public clouds, including software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS), while others operate in private cloud environments. Multilayer and multidomain orchestration for provisioning, fulfilling and assuring services therefore must be able to operate across hybrid environments.
4. Real-Time Resource Consumption Logs
As environments become more virtualized, inventory essentially becomes data about virtual machines as they spin up and down in the cloud. A recent study from Stanford University found that 25 percent of about 16,000 servers (physical and virtual machines running on hypervisors) actually became "zombies," with no signs of useful compute activity for six months or more. When resources lay fallow, investments in energy, hardware, space, staff, licenses and maintenance are compromised. Service providers need a real-time view of resource consumption in order to optimize cloud resource utilization, availability and flexibility.
These four capabilities are fundamental building blocks for automating operations in a digital, virtual, DevOps-driven service environment. And although this isn't an exhaustive list of capabilities, its focus on real-time, dynamic and hybrid capabilities aligns with where OSS and service provider IT are headed.
Can your OSS support multivendor hybrid environments as digital services proliferate?