InSync Information Technologies Pvt LtdPioneering Network Automation
InSync Information Technologies Pvt LtdLegacy ways of offering network services to consumers takes time, involves human intervention therefore less scalable and rigid. In this journey towards transforming into a digital services provider, CSPs need to evolve their customer experience and legacy operational structures. This is where technologies such as network automation plays a major role in the transformation journey of a CSP.
Communication service provider environment is vastly different than that to an enterprise. Its role is to provide uninterrupted network services for its customers. As such, network is the core business for communications service providers. Network environments at CSPs are complex and consist of multi-vendor devices. CSPs leverage network automation with SDN technologies, adopt NetDevOps practices, and use network automation and orchestration platforms.
Network automation at CSPs can be leveraged for variety of use-cases such as network operations and maintenance, circuit provisioning, internal IT network service automation and many more.
Service provisioning is a business critical function for service providers. Operations divisions run provisioning and de-provisioning tasks on routine basis. These could be customer L2/L3VPN circuit provisioning, global connectivity circuit provisioning, bandwidth upgrade services or any other. In today’s competitive business environment, enterprises require flexibility and timely provisioning of circuits for its business operations. Therefore, timely and on-demand delivery of circuits are crucial for service providers to make their enterprise clients meet their expectations. InSync’s automation engine provides portals to service provider administrators as well as to its clients enabling them to automate circuit provisioning, on-demand bandwidth and for demand-based billing as opposed to a fixed term billing.
One of the key operational challenges of a service provider is to manage the large number of work orders received on frequent basis. Upon receiving a business requirement to provide a new service, a work order is created and send to network operations team to execute the necessary configuration on network nodes.
Although operations teams attend to these quite swiftly, these routine operations can be automated. This will greatly increase the productivity, accuracy and efficiency of the operations team saving valuable time for more creative work.
InSync Automation Engine can receive work orders and extract the required parameters to do the configurations automatically, taking the error prone human configuration away from the equation. InSync Automation Engine’s ability to configure multi-vendor devices based on a standard set of configuration parameters makes service providers be swift when it comes to service fulfilment efficiently and accurately.
Service providers manage CPE WAN routers for large enterprises such as banks that has a large branch network. Monitoring, troubleshooting and change management of WAN routers is a time-consuming tedious task due to sheer volume of devices and number of customers. InSync automation engine solves this problem by giving portals and dashboards for service providers and to its enterprise customers to manage pre-defined set of change configurations by themselves. Further it gives status comparison of devices for service providers to diagnose WAN related tickets raised by its customers.
Often network nodes go through software upgrades and changes. Performing a network-wide software upgrade and change can be tedious, time consuming and error-prone. With network automation, the entire process of a network wide software upgrade and change management workflows can be automated and tested for validation.
Today, service providers are requested to provide SD-WAN solutions for their enterprise clients. And the demand for SD-WAN is ever increasing. Large number of vendors provide SD-WAN solutions and enterprises prefer the liberty to choose a solution that matches their requirement. As with any other multi-vendor solution, SD-WAN introduces multi-vendor SD-WAN controllers to service provider environment making it complex to manage it. InSync’s SD-WAN service orchestration platform integrates over APIs to multi-vendor SD-WAN controllers to provide a single pane of glass to service providers. Going a step further, platform can be extended to enterprises with self-care portals for SD-WAN context management, circuit requests, bandwidth upgrades, billing and for troubleshooting.
Large number of tickets are made with IT division in a typical large enterprise environment requesting access to services on permanent or temporally basis. Requirements could come from both business users as well as from developers. These requests are fulfilled manually by the network administrators by logging in to respective devices. This routine manual operation can be automated with InSync’s automation engine as the platform supports automation of these tasks through automated service activation of network and systems.
InSync automation engine can manage multivendor networks and thereby giving a centralized portal for network administrators to manage networks. Some of the manual routine work such as configuration backups, bulk-configuration provisioning, state comparison and similar network management related tasks can be automated through the platform. Further device management tasks such as inventory, configuration, upgrades and backups can be managed through the platform.
Market data access – Capital markets serves large number of brokers handling thousands of market data feeds. Timely access to market data is crucial for brokers for business decisions and therefore enabling access on demand plays a key role in trading business. Market data is nothing but a multicast feed that’s enabled or disabled by firewalls at the exchange based on business needs of brokers. In a high frequency trading environment (HFT), hundreds of enablement requests come on daily basis to provide market data access to brokers. This is a routine task handled by network engineers on daily basis and a manual process that involves business requirement translation to technical requirement. InSync’s network automation solution for capital markets help exchanges to automate market data access provisioning for greater efficiency, responsiveness, accuracy and visibility.
Market data access requires connectivity that’s created on on-demand basis. This requires site to site connectivity between exchange and brokers which is a time-consuming manual routine job. InSync automation engine automates this process by giving out of the box workflows for enabling disabling VPN tunnel provisioning.