A managed service provider (MSP) delivers and manages either network-based or customer premises-based services, applications, and equipment for enterprises, residences, or other service providers. MSP services offerings can comprise fully outsourced network-management arrangements, including advanced features such as IP telephony, messaging and call centers, VPNs, managed firewalls, and monitoring and reporting of LANs. MSPs can perform most of these services from outside a company's internal network, with special emphasis on integration and certification of Internet security for applications and content. They serve as outsourcing agents for companies, especially other service providers such as Internet service providers (ISPs) that do not have the resources to constantly upgrade or maintain faster and faster computer networks.
Types of Managed Services
IT managers have discovered that selectively outsourcing network implementation and some aspects of the ongoing management of their evolving network to a qualified service provider is a viable alternative that brings distinct cost savings and operational advantages. Outsourcing also can lower implementation costs as well as ongoing support costs, freeing valuable resources to focus on strategic IT initiatives.
Businesses may choose to outsource part or all of their corporate networking requirements to service providers that are offering management and maintenance of connectivity, access routers, network security, enhanced value-added services, and support.
As a result, managed services come with one of the following levels of outsourcing:
• Monitor-only services
• Monitor and response services
• Fully managed services
• Fully outsourced services
Essentially, the managed services model described herein depends on the service-level agreement (SLA) and the place in the network (PIN). SLAs are more comprehensive as customers elect to transition from monitor-only to fully outsourced services. The PIN also indicates whether the service platform is customer premises equipment (CPE) or network-based.
For example, for monitor-only services the service provider only monitors and devises alerts for the IP services, whether they are VPN, security, or unified-communications services. If an IP Security (IPsec) VPN tunnel goes down or an IP phone loses connectivity, the service provider only alerts the customer.
With monitor and response services, service providers offer SLAs under which they determine remedial actions and suggest response times within which they could complete these actions. For example, if an IPsec VPN tunnel goes down at the head end or an IP phone loses connectivity, the service provider alerts the customer and identifies both the root cause and the resolution to restore the service, including the time for resolution.
If a service provider identifies the root cause and resolution and executes the resolution within the SLA response time, then the service is fully managed.
For the fully managed service, the service provider assumes operational responsibilities to guarantee the SLA, including the response time. For example, if IP phone connectivity is lost and it is due to a faulty phone device, the service provider replaces the phone device within the timeframe specified in the SLA.
Why Customers Value Managed Services
Figure 1. Value of Managed Services
Figure 1 shows that the main reason customers value managed services is that such services support the business initiative. At the same time, cost reduction remains a compelling factor because it directly affects profitability. However, some of the reasons for adapting managed services are more strategic:
• Migrating away from tactical, fix it as it breaks, approach and moving to availability and performance consideration helps plan for the future, with predictable costs
• Reduction of suppliers helps businesses with vendor (service provider) management problems
• Mitigate risk associated with the deployment of advanced technologies.
• Broad portfolios and convenience are becoming strategic reasons to adopt managed services
Additional considerations are emerging as businesses learn how to take advantage of managed-services offers. For example, a global organization wants managed services to offer:
• Consistent, global managed services: Global businesses must receive the managed services consistently to ensure that productivity advantages are gained across all the business's locations.
• Collaboration acceleration: With consistent service levels across the business's global locations, the business can succeed in collaborating internally across teams as well as externally with partners.
• Escalating compliance concerns: Because of enforcement of compliances to stay operational and related penalties for noncompliance, businesses must budget for services such as security, giving MSPs a fair chance at competing for those budgeted dollars.
• Security threats - inside and out: A paradigm shift in the security landscape has resulted in the industry agreement that the weakest link in network security is the endpoint and the user sitting behind it. As a result, internally stemming threats are of paramount importance for businesses. Defense-in-depth security philosophy now must be executed with layered protection against externally and internally stemming threats.
• Cost-effective managed services bundles: To cater to business needs, service providers must create technology bundles that align with the industry focus. They can create financially attractive bundles as well as building competitive advantages in making the bundles attractive to particular industry segments. Appropriately crafted SLAs allow service providers to have the right margins on those bundles for profitability.
Managed Services Delivered on Cisco Aggregation Services Routers
Managed services are by definition communications and information technologies delivered as finished solutions that are managed remotely from a network operations center (NOC). A series of macro market trends have combined to fundamentally change customer attitudes about managed services, and these trends are creating new opportunities for innovative MSPs to deliver differentiated solutions to their customers:
• Globalization and e-commerce have opened new opportunities for business expansion along with new competitive pressures for companies of all sizes
• Advances in mobile networking have permitted workers to do their jobs anywhere, creating new challenges in enabling employee collaboration and protecting valuable data.
To support this growth and the changing market dynamics, the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Router is an outstanding platform for delivery of leading managed services, either on the customer premises or at the intelligent edge of the service provider network.
The Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router allows service providers to aggregate all of these WAN-based services requirements in an intelligent, resilient, secure, and scalable fashion for delivery in a managed services bundle:
• Instant-on service capabilities that facilitate rapid time to market and margin value with additional capacity, performance, and feature sets allow incremental service delivery with a licensing key
• Managed service delivery with a remote service-delivery model takes advantage of modular Cisco IOS® Software, and a network processor or modular core approach eliminates the need for hardware swap to accommodate customer growth
• The high-availability design with hardware and software redundancy is enhanced by in-service software upgrades (ISSUs), and performance and scale are attainable even under adverse conditions such as routing or forwarding hardware failure
• End-to-end service control with faster convergence time facilitates performance control over bursty voice or video transmissions
• Delivering enhanced SLA-reaching application awareness aligned with application requirements results in lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for the business
• Scaling for IPv6 and encrypted IPv6 services (government and industry directive) is becoming more and more critical to businesses
Managed Services Benefits at the Edge
The highly adaptive Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router service platform blends intelligence and high performance in a footprint that is significantly smaller than that of comparable solutions or standalone routers. Additionally, quality-of-service (QoS) and application granularity results in customized service delivery aligned with optimal application behavior. These router strengths translate to tangible advantages for managed services.
Instant-On Service Delivery
The Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router is the first router with "instant-on" service capabilities, meaning that users can turn on services as needed with no downtime or effect on ongoing operations. For the service provider, this capability translates to improved profitability. The ability to rapidly and remotely turn on services means no more complete equipment upgrades - reducing carbon footprint and minimizing the burden on internal resources.
The Cisco QuantumFlow Processor makes instant-on capabilities possible. This processor QuantumFlow Processor allows the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router to instantly activate the managed services at full capacity without any hardware upgrades. The Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router is truly an integrated managed services platform.
The Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router provides managed services that facilitate application awareness; VPNs; and security, unified communications, and video services:
• Video running on IPTV requiring highest latency-sensitive traffic such as voice over IP (VoIP) is protected with QoS priority-run policies that are transparent on the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router. The highly latency-sensitive VoIP traffic is not affected because the Cisco QuantumFlow Processor provides ample capacity and intelligence
• Video requires scaling, and multimedia is enabled with efficient multicast replication that is executed in silicon by the Cisco QuantumFlow Processor, which facilitates line-rate forwarding without in-fabric replication
Integral security allows line-rate IPsec throughput combined with stateful firewall inspection with customization capabilities.
Highly Available Aggregation Class
Managed-service success is, in part, defined by the availability of the network and is grounded in a provider's ability to manage it. Mission-critical service availability influences businesses to deploy high-availability solutions that ensure business continuity even under adverse conditions. Furthermore, businesses have concluded that IT is a prime business enabler. As a result, while designing business processes for successful operations, businesses are promoting "business continuity" to a higher priority. The Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router provides a highly suitable platform for realizing strenuous high-availability requirements.
The Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router offers advanced availability features. It provides hardware and software redundancy of the control plane, data plane, and input/output planes, helping ensure full redundancy. The Cisco ASR 1002 and ASR 1004 Routers actually offer a software-redundant Cisco IOS Software control plane with active and standby modes. The Cisco ASR 1006 provides both full hardware and software redundancy. With redundant forwarding planes and routing planes, the Cisco ASR 1006 has fully synchronized Cisco IOS Software instances to help ensure under 50-milliseconds cutover when the control plane fails, resulting in no data loss because the data plane experiences no interruption.
Intelligent Service Pairing
For MSPs, it is important to provide differentiated services based on service features as well as providing SLAs. In order to generate customer loyalty, single-source solutions providers that can also offer customized managed services will appeal to clients that do not have the internal resources to address them. Having the IP Next-Generation Network (IP NGN), with intelligent services that provide cost-effective value-add that businesses cannot build, allows providers to offer exceptional services to their business customers, including some built on the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router:
• Programmable application-aware services for rapid and reliable video delivery
• Secure unified communications based on the Cisco Session Border Controller (SBC)
Programmable Application-Aware Services
The rate of change in business requirements and associated applications is fast-paced. To accommodate such changes, MSPs need a platform that allows tuning of managed services quickly and cost-effectively without compromising performance or availability. The Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router delivers service-tuning capabilities to reflect changes in business requirements.
In the light of changing requirements for today's business and managed services, an MSP must work with the business to effectively define and then prioritize applications based on their business effect and criticality. In other words, mission-critical applications such as bills and tickers must receive priority over basic data transfers. Although MSPs currently do offer different QoS capabilities that prioritize traffic content based on a business's needs, more is needed. Increased bandwidth demands such as video and enterprise applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) of video-delivery services, for example, require improvement beyond standard QoS priorities. Increasingly, businesses will see that video delivered over IP Multicast - content-push services intelligently handled directly by the network - can provide more reliability and responsiveness than content delivered by server farms. As the network takes a more intelligent role in delivering media-rich applications, the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router feature set allows MSPs to "program" application awareness as needed for the required priority treatment to suit smooth accommodation of such applications.
The Web 2.0 experience is multifaceted, offering an endless array of IP-enabled interactive entertainment, and it must be delivered rapidly. Delivery of video content needs to be reliable and responsive to meet business video requirements - adding another challenging requirement to the need to deliver "any-play services". Application awareness enabled by the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router permits service prioritization of any content from or to any device applied on a per-service basis, allowing the network to elevate the priority of VoIP or video services that cannot sustain latency or jitter. This capability also creates additional revenue streams because applications can have elevated priority and enhanced performance per subscriber.
Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers at the access points through to the edge allow businesses or their MSPs to natively transport IP Multicast traffic, alleviating much bothersome latency. The benefits of multicasting capabilities combined with application-recognizing features such as Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR), Cisco IOS Flexible Packet Matching (FPM), and QoS help service providers manage unified quadruple-play (video, voice, data, and mobility) service delivery of today's and tomorrow's managed services while taking full advantage of the industry's most robust service-intelligence capabilities enabled by Cisco IOS Software.
Secure Session Border Controllers
VoIP, video streaming, instant messaging, and Telepresence are just some of the real-time, IP-based applications enjoying rapid growth in today's competitive communications market. Service providers are now finding it efficient and economical to directly interconnect their IP networks to both customer and other service provider IP networks. This trend has created a requirement for SBCs to help service providers control and manage real-time multimedia communications sessions at the borders between their IP networks. Session border controllers serve as the "VoIP command and control as well as media traffic" managers for the network. An SBC provides border control either between access and core networks or among interconnecting core networks:
• Secure SBC at peering edge: The SBC forms the border between network operators. Here it secures the network border, enforces QoS policies, facilitates traversal of any intermediate Network Address Translation (NAT) and firewall events, and provides regulatory compliance.
• Secure SBC at access edge: The SBC allows the service provider to access the residential and corporate user across NAT and firewall devices while also providing QoS, core network security, and regulatory compliance.
Regulatory compliance and the protection of confidentiality of content transported over unified communications requires securing the contents adequately. With a Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router at both the peering and access edges, an MSP can build an intelligent service pairing to provide highly secure unified communications based on the SBC.
At the peering edge, the SBC needs to be able to handle traffic volume as VoIP traffic traverses multiple trusted peering relationships between MSP networks, whereas at the access edge it needs to handle hundreds of thousands or even millions of untrusted subscribers along with a diversity of endpoints, applications, and interoperability concerns.
Furthermore, because MSPs provide consumer services that require scaling, the access edge has different requirements when delivering business services. Base-level "business-grade" VoIP needs to be secure, reliable, and available, and it needs to offer strict QoS. Today, however, it is also about a lot more than reliable VoIP - it is about ever-increasing unified-communications features such as instant messaging, presence, Find Me/Follow Me, and Click to Talk that require responsiveness, reliability, and accuracy beyond VoIP network needs. The Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router addresses these ever-escalating unified-communications requirements. It can massively and securely scale at the edge with no incremental performance effect.
Environmentally Friendly
The price-to-performance and feature richness of the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router maximizes its installed life. Given the longer lifecycle of our products, they generally generate less waste over time compared with personal computers and electronics. Importantly, material and component selection of the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router helps reduce the overall carbon footprint. Likewise, Cisco extends innovation to product packaging materials, choosing those that help reduce costs and minimize effect on the environment.
Data centers are always looking to improve the consumption footprint when it comes to space; power; and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). Data centers with the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router are significantly greener, given that performance required is now delivered from a compact footprint.
Summary
As businesses today compete by accessing required assets and information from anywhere at anytime, IT function is increasingly seen as an important enabler. Given that technology changes are so fast-paced, businesses adapting technologies need to look to service providers for managed services to enable applications that allow information to reach the workforce. As service providers build IP NGNs, businesses are demanding more and more sophistication in managed services. Instant activation of services, full performance without compromise, and high availability for the managed services is just some of the required services of businesses today. The Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router platform as a CPE device and on the edge offers a value proposition in price-to-performance that mandates delivery of such services on this next-generation platform.
Learn More About the Cisco IP NGN Security Architecture and Systems
Integrated, collaborative, and adaptive security in the evolving Cisco IP NGN architecture is built into the fabric of the service provider's network infrastructure and integrated with other network elements. Cisco provides a comprehensive security product portfolio and assists service providers in developing revenue-generating managed security services from concept to implementation and marketing. Security is not an afterthought at Cisco - it is a fundamental part of the service provider's business that affects all services.
