Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 20 | Page 75

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Mobile Technology Consistency and customer empowerment will give telco service providers an edge ///////////////////////////// How do telco providers give themselves the edge over their competitors? Mohammed Al-Moneer, Regional Director, MENA at A10 Networks, argues that consistent service and customer empowerment are key. F or service providers, consistency is imperative. Experience an outage? Service can’t scale to meet demand? Suffer a cyberattack? These events can severely harm the reputation and business of a telecom service provider. As an industry, we have the tendency to get caught up in the speeds and feeds. How fast is a service delivered? How much data can we cram in a pipe at a single time? What are the packets per second? And while fast is good, consistent is better. Think of it this way: it’s better to have a slower connection www.intelligentcio.com that is available 99.999% of the time than it is to have an ultra-fast connection available just 50% of the time. Consistency wins. And in the always-on, digital, connected world, consistency is the norm and therefore goes unnoticed. It’s inconsistency that gets the headlines. But how do you employ a set of consistent services? Here are four steps to service consistency: 1. Start internally: Ensure your network and security policies are enforced consistently across data centres and clouds and that they can be centrally managed from a single location. This ensures that your services are being delivered consistently regardless of where they live 2. Ensure your infrastructure can scale: Consistent service delivery requires around-the-clock availability. That means your services can’t slow down during peak demand. Having a hybrid infrastructure where cloud bursting is an option – sending traffic to the cloud when the data centre gets overloaded INTELLIGENTCIO 75