Zero touch operations is the future amid COVID-19

Over the last two years, the telecom sector has slowly realized the pivotal role played by digitization and automation. They address deep-seated cost and service challenges that can lead to enhanced efficiencies in operations and overall customer experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the advent of 5G rollouts are also accelerating the need for faster adoption of new-age technologies such as Cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) across telecom operations, including within the Operations Support Systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS).

This has helped telecom operators realize their networks’ potential and help them stay competitive in the market.

Emerging Technologies Revamping the Telecom Ecosystem

The telecom environment is continuously expanding and evolving. We are seeing Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is slowly replacing dedicated network appliances and technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing redefining the way networks will operate.

Hyperscalers are entering the market and telecom providers are seen diversifying into the cloud and cybersecurity services space. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has created an urgent need for telecom operators to restructure their operations into more autonomous business models, with minimal human intervention.

As the 5G deployment begins, there would be a need for a new generation of cloud-based services, which would require telco providers to bring in automation natively. In fact, according to a survey by GSMA, it is expected that one third of mobile network operators would have automated 80% of their network operations by 2025.

Having said that, all these disruptions, while vital for growth in the telecom sector, add to the challenge of dealing with elements like physical and virtual networks.

Multi-vendor environments, traditional human-intensive workflows and processes that are time-consuming and costly, different types of cloud infrastructures and solutions are some other challenges.

In addition, a huge number of domains are currently managed separately. Customers are looking for more speed, value, data, and services, pushing operators to invest more in their next-generation networks.

To create a strongly interwoven environment that brings all these together and not only is cost-effective but also promotes faster innovations, organizations need to move towards establishing autonomous self-healing operations across end-to-end network and service management.

Zero-touch Operations: Game-changer for Telecom

Automation of telecom processes and operations has become the need of the hour. The idea behind automation is to deliver networks that have minimal manual operational requirements.

It is here that ‘Zero-touch’ operation can be the game-changer for organizations by enabling services through fully automated networks.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) combined with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and analytics, or simply put, intelligent automation form the building blocks for Zero-touch operations or networks.

Network operations include dozens of applications getting monitored and there could be high incident of issues arising due to infrastructure, application performance, interaction, etc., at any given point of time. One needs a lot of manpower to monitor this.

The odds of occurrence of incidents would drastically fall since technology can detect any inconsistency in the workflow.  It can also take appropriate proactive steps to resolve the same without requiring any manual/ human involvement.

Further, zero-touch operations can enhance efficiencies in manpower utilization as well as reduce time to service and cost of operations. This can result in investments getting rerouted towards more essential business requirements such as enabling new and innovative services.

Roadmap Towards Achieving Zero-touch Operations

While zero-touch automation is the answer for bringing revolutionary changes within the telecom industry, scalability and operability issues have made automation based on intelligent automation technology a slow progress.

To fully automate a complex network domain or vendor-specific architecture that involves multiple technologies and tooling can take years. This is more time consuming in the case of large operators that need to combine their various BSS and OSS activities across diverse businesses where systems and data are mostly siloed within specific BSS/OSS domains.

In order to achieve the goal of zero-touch operations through end-to-end data-driven automation, operators can leverage solutions that brings together all the latest and most innovative technologies under one roof to help create a technology enablement, which allows areas of monitoring, incident tracking, incident closure, self-healing on the systems.

Such solutions offer streamlined and seamless automated workflows that not only promise increased efficiencies and agility in operations, but most importantly ensures that your networks run at the speed of business.

In today’s fast evolving world, end-to-end automation with zero-touch operations has the potential to create a truly self-optimizing network of tomorrow.

This article has been written by Samit Banerjee, Division President, Amdocs