5 Reasons Your Network Transformation Is Failing

There are several challenges that come with network functions virtualization (NFV), a method of outlining and operating networking services. As businesses continue to grow and generate more information, it becomes increasingly difficult for company teams to harness the wide range of data produced by current systems in order to perform analytics, reduce latency, conduct tests, and more. 

These data challenges may be causing your network transformation to fail. But they can be tackled by substituting physical and software-based appliances with virtual functions, as a means of rearranging your services to cater to the network and the subscriber. By ingraining an end-to-end network automation platform, your business will experience less risks, and your network will run smoother. 

Here are five reasons why you may be having problems with your network transformation. By creating an automated and sturdy link between hardware and software proprietary network equipment, you’ll be able to control the network. 

1. Bumpy Service Chaining of Video Traffic Management Systems

For mobile operators, end user metadata from the control plane can be hard to relocate through service chains, especially under rigid time constraints. These complications exist because there are limitations on the amount, style, and functions of service chains.

Service function chaining (SFC) challenges are similar to those of NFVs, predominantly regarding deployments and the obligation to remain with legacy and physical network function vendors. As a result, the adjustments required to reconstruct and fix physical infrastructures into dynamic software-based models can be very costly.

2. Limitations of Scaling in a Heterogeneous Landscape

Unfortunately, in heterogeneous solution environments, operators can only acquire a maximum of four vendors that offer distinct services. As a result, if you happen to rely on a specific vendor for parental control, another for antivirus, and another for optimization, you probably won’t be able to operate harmoniously, as this separation requires multiple physical components. 

With each additional vendor comes more traffic to oversee—and therefore, more latency. Not surprisingly, this results in inadequate Quality of Experience (QoE), as the deployment of numerous services during user plane traffic must transition between various physical hardware. 

In other words, if customers using your service have to deal with lags, they might get frustrated and move to a competitor. Obviously, no business wants this to occur; customer attrition is already a challenge and difficult to reverse.

3. The Complexity of VNF Interoperability

As an operator, you expect vendors to offer interoperable NFVs, but it’s really up to them to decide on these matters. Vendors have invested so much into building their proprietary appliances that they aren’t willing to alter their solutions. Operators may choose to join together and go “against” the vendors, so to speak, but this doesn’t always come with change of landscape from the vendors. 

In other words, vendors might not be willing to make changes to their solutions in order to provide interoperable NFVs to users. This VNF interoperability becomes a predicament for both vendors and operators.

4. Lack of a Common Framework and Agile Processes

Operators are constantly agonizing over the fact that software from one vendor cannot be used with equipment from another. This slows down the transformation of VNFs and results in an unorganized and underqualified orchestration of systems that can jeopardize the performance of your services. 

This is one of the major problems associated with favorable NFV conversion. Unfortunately, there is no existing system to assure diverse vendor VNF interoperability. This means that your team will either go through a lengthy trial-and-error phase or need to dedicate time to testing current flows of microservices, service chains, and interoperation. 

By utilizing smart end-to-end visibility though, users can easily recognize and prioritize points-in-question about vendor interoperation.

5. Inefficient Signaling of Metadata

Even though it’s a general and basic requirement, it’s always been challenging for services to maintain the transmission of metadata from a classifier and headend to the lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) store. 

It is crucial to signal stores to deliver a subscriber-specific service. You can begin with a policy reference and network identification so that the mechanism will open and expand. With a plethora of supplies and modes of conduct from multiple vendors, as well as large volumes of metadata, it becomes substantially inefficient for the network to transport every packet.

Using Open Source for Network Automation

You can tackle the challenges of automating, managing, and virtually recognizing networks and application services by incorporating a solution that does it for you, thus reducing the need for manual work.

Solutions like Cloudify can leverage the power of open source to facilitate end-to-end network automation through intent-based action platforms that connect to any and all automation tools, such as a cloud, devices, or third-party products that your business works with.