From Reactive to Predictive Services: The Power of Services Innovation

When you think about IT services for your network, groundbreaking innovation may not be the first thing you think of. Top of mind for most people might be a world-class engineering team with great people skills, deep knowledge, and a long track record of success.

But now, with the launch of Cisco’s new predictive services portfolio, innovation moves to the top of the list. In a world where network downtime can result in losing thousands of customers, we need to do more than respond quickly and effectively to a network problem. We need to prevent the problem from happening in the first place.

That’s exactly what Cisco Services can do with two new suites of predictive services — Business Critical Services and High-value services. With these new services, enabled by AI and machine learning, we’re moving from a reactive approach to a preemptive approach, preventing network impacting events by predicting issues and delivering ongoing optimization services. Yes, you still get the expertise of our highly skilled engineers — but also 20 years of historical data from real-life customer scenarios and advanced machine learning capabilities that use data to predict problems before they happen.  We have delivered three major innovations to make this work:

First, a new service called Business Critical Insights compares how your network is performing compared to similar environments. We use machine learning to correlate your network’s performance with our knowledge base from similar deployments and industry best practices. We build a “fingerprint” of each device across the millions that we support, so we can correlate thousands of parameters within the hardware, software, and features you are using. So if, for example, you are suffering from a high number of issues, we can identify anomalies and pinpoint the cause of your problem.

The second innovation, Network Early Warning, studies and learns from patterns of events that lead to major failures, so we can preemptively take action. We recently predicted a scenario in a top U.S. bank’s network 32 hours before it would have caused a major outage. In another case, we analyzed voice log anomalies for a large Internet provider and identified a pattern in random packet drops three days before it led to noticeable call drops. Once we predict an event, we take action to minimize business impact.

Third, we have digitized the detection logic for a large number of known problems, which has created a system that drives automated issue detection. Now all of our Cisco Services engineers have the knowledge and experience of our best engineer—and can detect the cause of problems in a fraction of the usual time, sometimes even identifying issues the customer isn’t aware of. Let’s say your network performance inexplicably starts to degrade. Typically, a service engineer would go through extensive historical information to figure out why. But now, our automation system evaluates the data and can instantly discover the problem that is slowing everything down. The system not only identifies the problem, it automatically generates a trouble ticket with all the problem details and how to resolve it.

These new predictive services will reduce the complexity and cost of your network operations, reduce risk with automated compliance and remediation services, increase business agility, and accelerate the digital transformation of your business.

Check out our new video to see how our new predictive and preemptive capabilities can give you—and every customer—access to our best engineer, years of experience, and technology innovation, every time:

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