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Beyond the Costs
When you plan your day, you have the right intentions. You start your day, and everything is going as planned. Then a network outage happens. And it turns your world upside down, and nothing else gets done! Worse yet, you’re on vacation or enjoying time with your family on the weekend. Or its 3:00am in the morning, and you get that dreaded call, and your stomach gets all tied up in knots.
Carrier management can be a nightmare, even a single remote location with one SD-WAN edge device, two network circuits and a 4G wireless connection can set off five or more alerts at any point in time. This creates trouble ticket overload, with red, green, and yellow lights flashing on the monitors. Your network is screaming at you, and it needs your immediate attention
The ongoing management of multiple carriers can cause an ongoing stream of alerts and trouble tickets that must be immediately addressed. With soft and hard network outages, the help desk or IT team must open a ticket with the circuit provider to initiate the repair, and potentially assist the provider with the repair, by testing and checking interface status. If the problem is not resolved quickly, it must be escalated to the proper technical resources or up management chain. Then there is testing for visibility, running diagnostics to verify stability, and confirming with users that applications are up and running, before finally closing the ticket.
With all the other important business tasks, who has the time to devote to the frustrating and tedious tasks of fixing multiple carrier network problems?
- 24/7 scheduling maintenance windows – across multiple carriers can be a major headache
- RFOs are critical, but hard to obtain from the carrier. Once received, they tend to be cryptic
- SLA management – guarantees are only good if you have time to document the outage, and continue to badger the carrier to reimburse you for the outages
- Analyzing up/down status and network performance – takes dedicated precious time, that could be spent on higher value projects
- With multiple carriers, you have multiple NOCs to manage and coordinate. Do you have all carrier data and contact information at your fingertips 24/7?
- Carrier diversity is critical to achieve the benefits inherent to WAN performance. However, carrier diversity comes at a cost, with multiple layers of NOC support and escalation lists for each carrier, that can easily spiral out of control
- The more carriers you add, the more complex your support becomes
- You need diverse carrier to drive optimal performance on SD-WAN
SD-WAN does not solve any of these problems. SD-WAN actually compounds these problems, with the addition of more carrier networks. The large, tier 1 carriers offer no flexibility, and only make things more complex. Carrier invoicing is designed to be difficult to read, and disputes rarely get resolved, because of constant turnover by carriers, and delays in processing.
All these issues can be resolved with a Global Carrier Management (GCM) service.
“Mosaic helped us get the best priced deal on an aggregate commit, while still keeping some flexibility in our carrier contracts, which was important to us. When we switched from static routing to using BGP they were helpful at all stages of the process, and the migration went very smoothly. Mosaic has helpful and technically proficient staff, and I have always had positive contract and technical contact with them. I highly recommend them.”