IT and networking environments are becoming more and more complex as businesses digitalise. The adoption of multi-cloud strategies, the need to deal with multiple vendors and domains, and the incorporation of different services into the technology stack, each with their own resource requirements and dependencies, translate into a huge provisioning and management challenge for the enterprise.
At the same time, businesses are struggling to respond to disruptions caused by the pandemic and other changes in an increasingly dynamic business landscape. Knee-jerk fixes, such as hardcoding dependencies into systems and software, have proven not to work. They only lead to rigid infrastructures that hinder the enterprise’s ability to adapt and scale.
A more viable solution lies in service orchestration, which enables businesses to coordinate and manage systems that span multiple clouds, technology stacks and domains—all from a single web portal.
Service orchestration involves several levels of abstraction. Below the orchestration layer, at the infrastructure or resource level, a programmable infrastructure allows network devices and flow control to be managed by software that operates independently from the network hardware.
Above the orchestration layer sit the applications and services which are decoupled from the resources needed for technical fulfilment.
Orchestration services serve as the go-between, setting up and managing the individual services and provisioning the necessary resources through API calls. This greatly simplifies the operational and functional processes involved in designing, creating, and delivering end-to-end services.
A well-executed orchestration strategy is key to ensuring that businesses are able to meet the growing need for on-demand services through dynamic provisioning, service optimisation, and service assurance.
By initiating and executing changes in software, end-to-end service orchestration does away with the long lead times associated with hardware procurement and provisioning. For example, by programming a network for a new data centre or branch instead of deploying and configuring network devices on-site, the service orchestration approach can reduce the lead time from months to a matter of hours or even minutes, dramatically improving the time to revenue.
Service orchestration also keeps complexity in check, enabling businesses to coordinate workflows, business processes, network capabilities, and IT systems across multiple domains using a web portal. The single pane of glass makes it easier for the enterprise to manage its heterogeneous network and IT environment, monitor and manage virtual services, and quickly identify and address faults across the infrastructure.
Beyond these operational advantages, end-to-end service orchestration also plays a critical role in accelerating innovation by facilitating the adoption of emerging technologies.
The deployment of 5G is a case in point. With a 10x increase in speed over 4G, a 100x increase in capacity, and the ability to support local breakouts, 5G has the potential to disrupt business processes and catalyse the creation of new business models, products and services.
For example, breakout of traffic to multi-access edge compute facilities will enable data to be processed much closer to the source, enabling real-time communications for ultra-low latency IoT applications. With 5G’s network slicing capabilities, independent local networks can also be created on the same physical network infrastructure to address bandwidth and performance requirements of different applications.
Many businesses, however, are hesitating over its adoption because of concerns over the complexity of integrating 5G with existing technologies and processes.
An end-to-end service orchestration strategy will help to address these fears. By abstracting and decoupling the network layer from services and applications, it will enable businesses to incorporate programmable 5G capabilities into their core infrastructure without having to carry out the networking equivalent of open-heart surgery.
This will help businesses to position themselves to manage growing complexity, respond better to the challenges of a dynamic business environment, and embrace innovation to empower their operations.
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