Euromedia November December | Page 15

monitoring. More and more solutions are possible strictly in software, and do not require customised and expensive hardware platforms. The real challenge is likely to be the learning curve for the ‘television’ engineers out there who now must contend with different cabling, routers, and an abundance of non-television traffic being carried by their newly minted video-over-IP systems. if you are outsourcing parts of your video delivery chain to a third party, it becomes more of an SLA issue. In this case, it becomes very important to objectively understand the service quality at the ingress to and egress from the external service provider. Whether this monitoring should shift to the cloud or not no one can afford having the same amount of legacy T&M equipment. The cloud is the only answer to this growing multi-platform distribution environment, flexibly scaling as requirements grow and change, and immediately addressing the issues whenever and wherever the need is. This ensures Segment Survey 2016 As service provision moves to the Cloud, must T&M also? Accenture: There does indeed need to be virtualised testing in the cloud. An uptick in continuous delivery and DevOps means there is an increased demand for teams to work cross-functionally. The Cloud provides greater accessibility, additional elasticity and scalability for testing and monitoring systems. Ultimately, the focus must be centred on the quality of experience the customer has so it is about applying the most relevant testing at the most appropriate time. As such, testing must be flexible enough to work within virtual and real world environments. Agama: Moving services to the cloud can involve both a business model change and a technology change. From a technical point of view, if an operator virtualises parts of the service infrastructure, it makes a lot of sense to also virtualise relevant parts of the monitoring solution. On the other hand, is really a separate question. Either way, when moving to cloud-based solutions, the operator should take care to have complete control of the monitoring and ownership of the resulting data. Bridge: The Cloud is the future, and T&M should share the same home as the network. There are, though, misconceptions about what it is that we perhaps need to dispel. The Cloud is more of a business model than a technology model: at the end of the day, we may say that we are moving to the Cloud, but we’re still, in effect, just executing the same software on the same hardware – it’s just somewhere else. The difference is mostly in how we pay for it, and perhaps who manages it. It’s a natural direction for us at Bridge Technologies to take – in fact, one that we have already taken.. Qligent: Absolutely! With services moving to the cloud, there is no single path or single point of failure. There are millions of ways your service could reach your customers, and unprecedented coverage while optimising monetary investments. Rohde & Schwarz: To monitor cloud-based content delivery it is important to provide monitoring solutions that can be deployed in cloud-based environments and make it possible to detect the cloud-specific problems. Monitoring a service running over the cloud using a platform running in the cloud makes total sense. “Operators are now beginning to invest in T&M and put this at the core of their service to ensure a seamless QoE across all devices.” Accenture Digital Video EUROMEDIA 15