"Finding and fixing security vulnerabilities in network-based systems and applications before they get deployed is critical to staying secure as threats get more targeted and sophisticated. Enterprises need to establish and augment repeatable vulnerability management processes to be more effective at finding complex vulnerabilities and to use tools and technologies to become more efficient at finding and fixing weaknesses before they are exposed on production systems. "

John Pescatore
Vice President & Distinguished Analyst
Gartner Inc.

VoIP, IPTV & IMS Architecture

Challenges

Service Assurance of next-generation IP services — or ensuring reliability, availability and security of services such as Voice over IP (VoIP), Internet Protocol-based TV (IPTV) and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) — is one of the most critical issues facing service providers and their vendors. To compete and succeed, all next generation IP services must deliver an extremely high quality of experience.

•  Customers, Partners and Analysts Comment on NGN Deployment Success
  
•  Network Product Customers Eliminate NGN Deployment Fire Drills using Mu
•  Changing the Checklist: Problems Customers Find/Resolve using Mu

With customers’ growing demand for high-value services, the inherent complexity and diversity of next generation networks, and the natural consequence of accelerated product development and deployment, the service quality problem is getting worse, not better.  According to InStat, worldwide cable telephony service revenues are on track to reach $12.6 billion in 2008, up from $10.7 billion in 2007. Total worldwide cable telephony subscribers are projected to reach 37 million by the end of 2008, and rise to over 64 million by 2012.

High Cost of Downtime

Achieving the service levels that customers expect means minimizing downtime. There are two types of network downtime:

• degradation, when a latency-sensitive service is slower than usual, perhaps even useless
• outright outage, when a service is unavailable

Both types of downtime incur significant costs for service providers. NSP Partners quantified many Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investments metrics including an online calculator.  These costs include:

• lost revenue from service downtime
• customer churn
• avoidable support costs
• service level agreement (SLA) related penalties
• decreased average revenue per user (ARPU)

Solution

To address these challenges of reliability, availability and security, a rapidly growing number of service providers are turning to Mu’s service assurance solution. The Mu solution, including service-level traffic variations, helps eliminate quality issues including system crashes, distributed denial of service attacks, and more subtle issues like response-time latency and CPU utilization spikes. Proactively and continuously addressing these issues enables service providers to improve their bottom line.

To find out how the Mu solution helps leading network operators ensure the highest possible customer quality of application experience with no downtime please take a minute to read one of Mu's NGN best practice application case studies:

• VoIP
• IPTV
• IMS

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