We could probably sum up the direction the financial services industry is headed in just two words: digital transformation. It’s the buzzy, all-encompassing focus and end goal of financial services organizations near and far, and it’s the big reason why many organizations are thinking about process automation with a greater sense of urgency.

Gartner®, in its latest Market Guide for Network Automation Platforms released November 2023, followed the company’s track record of research that provides recommendations to industry leaders, showcases market trends, and shares next-level automation insights.

Incident response in a Network Operations Center (NOC) is cumbersome and time-consuming. There are many steps, many sources where incidents come from, and a long, long list of complexities involved. For instance, for incident response with a NOC, there’s the initial monitoring – Tier 1 functions of “eyes on glass” work of looking at alerts coming in and what they’re for, such as a security breach, performance issue, a hardware failure, among others.

It’s safe to assume that planning ahead is everything to business leaders right now, as the start of 2024 is right around the corner. It’s a strategy-backed priority to get proactive and ahead of challenges that might be ahead of us. As IT’s role in driving business success continues to expand, putting automation to work inside of IT departments and functions today better positions organizations to reach goals and overcome future obstacles.

From an IT perspective, technologists generally agree that the ability to monitor and have visibility into the IT stack across every one of their applications is essential with the now-permanent remote and hybrid work models. It also stems from the fact that digital transformation and IT growth has accelerated by seven years since the pandemic in 2020, analysts say.

Network Operations might never be the same. But then again, why would anyone want it to be? The power of automation and orchestration can bring incredible value to the Network Operations Center (NOC), including the business-critical call to get proactive and ahead of the incidence response and management game. It’s more than a towering volume of events – it’s the complexities involved, too.

Chances are, you’re familiar with the strategy of adding an additional “9” to service level agreements (SLAs) to boost the experiences your organization provides. With plenty of ways to do so, there’s one that particularly stands out among the others: Service Blueprinting. Banking executive Lynn Shostack in 1984 first described a service blueprint in a Harvard Business Review publication.

Telecommunication (Telco) companies everywhere share a similar vision: future-proofing their organizations for an unpredictable era of challenges and opportunities in an unreliable economy. Rebounds from the pandemic started out slow and patchy, and leading up to present day, moves like inflation-laced price increases and merger and acquisition (M&A) deals have ramped up share prices across the global telecoms sector to climb back up from 2020’s rock bottom.

A Dark Network Operations Center (NOC) is one that runs with no IT staff … at least that’s how it’s been defined up until now. But there’s more to interpret. Large, complex networks rely on the NOC — the core of network infrastructure — to keep them healthy and resilient. The NOC’s function allows employees, customers, partners, and other network users to rest a bit easier, and its integrity and accuracy gives them peace of mind.

The telecommunications industry today is focused on delivering advanced, reliable connectivity and the highest possible performance to consumers, all while getting ahead of the cutthroat competition. And accomplishment in these key areas comes with its fair share of challenges for communications service providers (CSPs) to meet customer expectations.