Introduction

The move toward 5G networks, the continued adoption of connected devices, the digitization of everyday activities, and the emerging hybrid workplace will all lead to an increase in both the volume of traffic and the types of services that need to be delivered securely and at scale over the internet.

Most tools used today by Communications Service Providers (CSPs) and other network operators to deliver and manage services are disparate and take time to navigate, leading to complexity, poor customer experience, and increased Operational Expense (OpEx). As networks become increasingly multifaceted, with many technology layers and vendor domains, and as services become increasingly dynamic, service providers must operate efficiently and cost-effectively using modern tools to stay competitive. End-to-end autonomous, or self-optimizing, networks allow service providers to proactively and competitively respond to changing market demands through automation, virtualization, and SDN innovations combined with AI-enabled analytics and near real-time insights.

To facilitate the networks and operations modernization journey, Cisco designed Crosswork Network Automation, which helps operators simplify network operations and reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Using Cisco Crosswork Network Automation can offer multiple benefits for organizations. Statistically, these benefits include:

Reduction in configuration and provisioning time:

Up to 80% reduction in the time required for network configuration and provisioning, reducing the process from days to hours or even minutes.

Decrease in human errors:

Up to 70% reduction in configuration errors due to automated processes and standard templates.

Improvement in problem detection and resolution time:

Up to 60% reduction in the time needed to detect and resolve network issues, thanks to advanced data analytics and monitoring.

Increase in staff productivity:

Up to 50% increase in network staff productivity, as they can focus on more strategic and complex tasks.

Reduction in operational costs:

Up to 30% reduction in network operational costs due to decreased need for manual operations and more efficient use of network resources.

Increase in network uptime:

Up to 40% increase in network uptime, due to proactive issue prediction and prevention.

Faster delivery of new services:

Up to 50% acceleration in bringing new services to market, due to the automation of processes related to service deployment and management.

These statistics demonstrate that Cisco Crosswork Network Automation can significantly enhance the performance and efficiency of organizational networks, especially in large and complex networks requiring precise and optimized management.

Accelerating automation transformation with Crosswork Network Automation

Crosswork Network Automation is a comprehensive software platform that simplifies and modernizes operations to meet the explosive demands for dynamic digital services across today’s increasingly complex networks.

The portfolio is built around three functional pillars for advanced automation:

Visibility

• Gain deep visibility of the network, with a view of the current state of devices, services, and networks to drive enhanced customer experience.

Insights

• Apply analytics to gather data to identify trends and patterns both for planning and problem resolution.

Action

• Automate operational processes, provide programmatic control of infrastructure and reduce the latency of end-to-end workflows.

Crosswork is designed with modern low/no-touch operations in mind. It is a multivendor and multidomain solution, centered on both programmatic infrastructure control and access to operational data, and spans both cloud/ SaaS and on-prem tools. The platform enables automatic, closed-loop operational control and helps execute the complete services, device and network lifecycle management, and operations with speed, precision, and accuracy. This spans visualization, planning, design, implementation, optimization, and ongoing monitoring and assurance of services. AI and machine learning along with human oversight are important parts of the process to ensure both scalable, intelligent automation, and operational integrity.

As an example, a service designer can create a service template for a VPN. Someone can then use that template to request an instance of the service. The high level of programmatic control that Crosswork provides means that the operations staff might not need to be involved at all—a customer could make a request via a customer-facing portal, which then directly routes the request to the automation tooling. Crosswork is intent-based, so it will take the service intent (the customer request to turn up a VPN) and convert that to a set of configuration changes on the underlying infrastructure and implement the changes automatically. Once the changes are successfully made, state and configuration information is updated. If for some reason the update fails, Crosswork can perform a rollback to the prior state and route an error message to the appropriate destination. Once the service is active, assurance and analytics will monitor the service and gather operational data.

The goal of Crosswork Network Automation is to allow both humans and machines to do what each does best to improve the customer experience and drive operational simplicity. In the prior example, the human does the skilled work of designing the service, and the automation tool replicates it quickly and flawlessly on demand. The sum of these efforts is an expert design efficiently delivered with high quality at machine speed.

Crosswork tools help protect and enhance the customer experience, simplifying the task of troubleshooting and going beyond uniform implementation. Because of the ongoing service monitoring and analytics, Crosswork tools can provide operational insights that shorten the time to root cause analysis and can even be used for auto-remediation. Crosswork also offers predictive Al-enabled capacity planning that empowers network operators to simplify capacity planning and optimize network performance, enhancing operational excellence.