Advancing service reliability

The recent pandemic highlighted the critical importance of communication services in our interconnected world. This also exposes the vulnerabilities of communication systems, putting their reliability to the test. With the increasingly vital role communication services play, it is more important than ever that they become more reliable and secure.

Bell Labs Consulting presents Advanced Service Reliability, a qualitative and quantitative analysis that provides a multi-discipline assessment of end-to-end (E2E) services to identify and resolve architecture and operational reliability issues. It provides prioritized actionable recommendations for service design and operations issues according to industry best practices that will help improve service reliability.

Operator challenge

Despite investments in redundancy, reliability has been hard to manage and achieve across the entire service chain while end-users are becoming more dependent. Major outages are not only revenue losses, but also cause bad press and brand erosion.

Bell Labs Consulting solution

A multi-discipline assessment of E2E services consists of:

• Architecture and technology scan of the network covering failure points, fault tolerance, scalability and detection and recovery mechanism.
• Operations assessment covering organization readiness, operations technology, data readiness, performance, and support readiness.
• Quantitative analysis covering service reliability modelling, reliability computations, SLA and KPI comparisons.

Architecture service reliability methodology

Implementing redundancy only delivers one piece of the puzzle. Building a reliable service requires adherence to a set of architectural principles with the ability to:

• Detect failure.
• Remove single point of failures.
• Detect and manoeuvre around failure points.
• Handle sustained and peak load.
• Recognize that an application is not optimally operating.

Operations service reliability methodology

Assessment of reliability readiness across operations lifecycle covers:

• Roles, responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed (RACI), interfaces, documentation, and knowledge.
• Change management processes.
• Business continuity procedures.
• Service assurance processes.
• Performance and capacity management.
• Maintenance, support, and vendor agreements.

Quantitative service reliability methodology