Service providers have to deal with increasing complexity in their networks and services, amid what have been highly manual and ponderous service assurance deployments that almost inevitably result in visibility gaps and too much data that needs highly skilled human interpretation to resolve issues. As Charles Thompson, VP of product management at Spirent Communications with a history of more than two decades in service assurance, put it, "Service assurance for operators has traditionally been very burdensome. It's been a very big deployment, [with] multi-week, multi-month services engagement to do, to get things up and running." There's typically a highly manual process of deploying software or hardware-based test agents: Figuring out where you want them, configuring them, pushing them out and often still being left with "massive visibility gaps" as new data centers and other new network elements come online or, in a software-defined networking world, as virtual machines spin up and down and routing changes in response Spirent Communications aims to simplify and automate with the launch if a new service assurance solution, Vantage. Spirent is "hyperfocused… on the mobile core" with the Vantage release, said Thompson, and invested in the solution with an eye toward how it expects networks to continue evolving over the next three to five years: A continuing push for 5G and the use of open, cloud-native and containerized infrastructure and multi-vendor environments, combined with massive data demand, and the need to assure new use cases, features and services that have not existed before, like Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC).

When was the last time you walked into a bank to withdraw cash? And how often do you balance your checkbook? These once routine manual processes are now primarily digital, even leading some financial giants to proclaim themselves tech companies. While many are keeping pace with consumers' demands for digital services, few organizations are implementing the advanced automated technologies that will help them stay competitive in today's digital era. Just over half (57%) of banks and credit unions started their digital transformations before this year, according to Cornerstone Advisors's "What's Going on in Banking 2021."

Moogsoft, a provider of artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), announced today the release of Moogsoft AIOps 7.2, the latest version of its enterprise platform. Release 7.2 features groundbreaking new capabilities that ease the burden of IT Operations and DevOps teams by optimizing service assurance. Significant new transparency, efficiency, and customization enhancements include: a new workflow engine, AI visualizations, performance dashboards, and new tool integrations. "Operations teams seek ways to tame the complexity of their IT environments and make sense of frequent alert storms," said Nancy Gohring, senior analyst for application and infrastructure performance at 451 Research. "Applying sophisticated analytics, including machine learning, is useful for improving the correlation of alerts and delivering better visibility. Automation enabled by this visibility will have a positive effect on incident response time and increase overall ops team productivity."

Today's operators are undergoing vast digital transformations to help shape their roadmaps for future innovation. That includes transforming existing networks to more virtualised environments and preparing for 5G. The new networks must be more robust and agile and at the same time, able to adapt to whatever the future will bring, Anand Gonuguntla, co-founder and CEO of Centina. Operators must also be prepared to manage a continued trend of software as a service and cloud-based service models. Assuring quality of existing and future services becomes both more challenging and more critical to these operators as the competition heats up.