Telecommunications Resiliency Starts with Network Visibility

 No matter which side of the climate debate you fall into, one thing is abundantly clear: Natural disasters appear to be happening more frequently and with greater ferocity. As a result of these disasters, telecommunications systems are being severely tested. The growing incidence of floods and hurricanes poses an enormous challenge to telecommunications companies. Add in the increasing complexity of networks, and the need for improved resiliency and the ability to restore services faster has become essential. This means carriers and internet service providers (ISPs) are under the gun to increase observability of their networks.

Counting on Telecommunication Systems in Times of Crisis 

It goes without saying that everyone caught in a natural disaster is dependent on telecommunications systems remaining up and available. First responders, residents, and infrastructure teams rely on mobile connectivity before, during, and after disaster strikes. According to Verizon’s 2021 Frontline Public Safety Communications Survey, 72 percent of first responders indicated that the smartphone was their most important piece of equipment.

Ensuring the reliability of telecommunications during natural disasters is made all the more difficult by increased reliance on networks from work-from-home and hybrid workforces. Further complexity has been introduced by expanded use of the cloud and by the rollout of 5G, which has opened the door to greater network virtualization, edge computing, and exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Due to the geographically dispersed nature of customers and the complexity of network assets, gaining sufficient visibility to troubleshoot issues following a natural disaster is a tall order. Overlapping dependencies can end up degrading service in an emergency, as well as create delays in the ability to restore service.

Observability Is Key to Ensuring Service

The key to ensuring service in good times and bad is to build observability into telecommunications systems. For carriers and ISPs, this means leveraging powerful new tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that assist in mapping out network complexity and uncovering blind spots. Observability is key to determining the cause of congestion and service degradation, as well as quantifying the customer experience, which can deliver a clearer view into network performance. Ultimately, these insights can be used to develop disaster response and business continuity plans to help ensure uptime.

Borderless Visibility Leads to Actionable Business Intelligence

Gaining the observability required to ensure telecommunications networks are available when needed during a crisis requires a deep understanding of the communications between service, infrastructure, and characteristics, regardless of the physical location of the data. A strong data foundation and deep packet-level visibility is instrumental in constructing an automation intelligence layer that can deliver real-time visibility across the entire infrastructure.

NETSCOUT’s Automated Analytics is an intelligent automation engine that runs millions of iterative sequences to reveal the root cause of issues that impact service quality. This advanced solution utilizes AI/ML algorithms injected with more than 30 years of domain knowledge from service providers around the globe driven by NETSCOUT’s Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) Smart Data to provide actionable business intelligence.

Omnis Automation enables carriers and ISPs to identify critical assets and network dependencies before a disaster strikes. This knowledge is crucial during an emergency because it allows service providers to identify actions that will restore service to the most people or accelerate services to first responders and critical infrastructure.

By building more observability into systems, carriers, and ISPs can respond more quickly to outages and disruptions to vital telecommunications networks during a natural disaster, which in many cases can be the difference between life and death.

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