Building a state-of-the-art telco cloud positions national carriers to deliver 5G, support IoT, and launch modern business services at scale. But migration takes time, and providers must find ways to operate hybrid physical and virtual infrastructures without having quality suffer or compliance efforts to fall short.

One 100-year-old European carrier deployed a Keysight Network Visibility Platform on-prem and in the cloud to meet the challenges of transformation head-on. The multinational provider of communications, entertainment, and business services recently began migrating physical operations to a virtual infrastructure to take advantage of cloud agility, speed and scale. In doing so, the infrastructure team knew change could bring new risk by adding complexity and introducing dangerous blind spots in visibility and monitoring.

As a precaution, the carrier extended its use of preferred performance monitoring and analysis solutions from physical data centers to the new virtual domain. Having a consistent monitoring infrastructure helps the team navigate the ins and outs of integrating new tools, managing new vendor partners, and satisfying expanded data privacy regulations.

That’s where Keysight’s CloudLens solution comes in.

CloudLens Visibility Helps Streamline Cloud Migration

Maintaining visibility in the cloud starts with capturing and filtering packet data for efficient analysis by monitoring tools, just like it does with tapping physical links. When the time came to choose a visibility platform, the operations team considered its past experience with multiple solutions. Its current success with Keysight stood out.

The carrier recently installed Keysight’s Vision network packet brokers (NPBs) at physical operations centers and found them easy to use. By comparison, competing visibility architectures did not perform or scale as well, nor were they backed by the same flexible licensing model and world-class customer support Keysight provides. 

Like the Vision packet brokers used on-prem, CloudLens visibility solutions aggregate, filter, and prepare traffic from any cloud-based network for analysis by performance monitoring tools.

The team heading up the telco cloud initiative also valued the way Keysight had become a trusted, responsive partner they could count on to help resolve monitoring challenges when needed.

CloudLens turns complexity to continuity

Pre-deployment testing showed that CloudLens could support the scale needed to achieve modern operational efficiencies and help streamline operations on day one. The telco obtained several hundred CloudLens licenses and began mobilizing to deploy Keysight software in its lab and live network environments.

As a result, Keysight’s cloud-native solutions stand to reduce the initial and ongoing cost and complexity of virtual and hybrid monitoring operations while having a cohesive visibility platform fortifies business and operational continuity. Keysight’s cohesive approach helps mask the added complexity of maintaining a large hybrid network infrastructure by:

• Reducing costs associated with data center operations
• Extending the value of existing monitoring solutions as utilization and modernization efforts evolve 
• Helping to detect and resolve potential performance and security incidents before they impact subscribers

With Keysight, operations experts can use the same or similar monitoring tools across their entire environment to extend existing workflows to the cloud, and to the future.