ARCHITECTURES FOR DELIVERING PROACTIVE NETWORK SERVICES IN DIVERSE BUSINESS ENVIRONMENTS

The introduction and adoption of cloud-based, as-a-service capabilities have had a dramatic impact on the network service management capabilities and the software architectures required to address the varied deployment requirements of customers. Historically customers were constrained, by cost, regulations, or technology, on how they designed and deployed their networks. In those environments customers deployed network management systems to manage the operations of their IT capabilities composed of vendor and opensource software. These systems were typically reserved for business-critical systems and had an operating cost above and beyond those of the business systems themselves. These support systems initially provided basic monitoring and alerting and over time expanded to include high value services such as security checks, compliance checks, policy management, and health monitoring. Over the previous decade there has been a move to migrate not only business capabilities but also the associated support systems into the cloud to reduce both software and administrative costs. This migration has not been ubiquitous across all industries due to regulatory, compliance, and security concerns as well as the nature of the company’s inherent business. This has driven the need for network service management companies to develop architectures that adapt to these new deployment models. This paper identifies 4 canonical service deployment architectures under development to address the diversity of on premise, cloud, in-a-box, and hybrid business system deployment models.