What is a Service Analyzer?
Service Analyzers automate the ability to proactively analyze a network product or application for inherent weaknesses that cause unexpected application, service or network downtime. While some of these problems arise from increasingly complex IP infrastructure buildout, others are due to known
and unknown vulnerabilities. Mu's automated proactive service assurance solution identifies reliability, availability and security issues to
address, and characterizes product, application or service quality.
What Problems Does Mu Solve?
Network operators depend on VoIP, IPTV application and service uptime. Additionally, the buildout of IMS architectures mandates IP-based system stability. But due to increasing application and architecture complexity, it is difficult to ensure they are robust, reliable and secure. Operators and their vendors depend on Mu to automate their quality product deployment and development efforts.
In a highly complex NGN network increased dependance on open, standardized communications and software increases the likelihood of adverse service impact from product bugs in distributed applications and networks. Unfortunately, left unfixed, some bugs lead
to reliability and security issues such as network downtime and service disruptions, which in
turn cause customer churn and revenue loss.
In an attempt to address these problems, network operators are actively trying to improve service availability and
product quality. But ensuring robustness, availability, and security
of IP-based systems is labor-intensive, and until now network operators and product vendors have lacked automation like Mu's solution to help them. Existing system testing tools have a few major limitations:
- Depth:
not able to thoroughly analyze end-to-end network infrastructure:
- Speed:
not able to automate application and service analysis with "time to market" requirements for product development and deployment;
- Breadth:
not able to automate the entire product deployment lifecycle or software development lifecycle.
To
address these limitations, Mu delivers the Mu Test Suite that helps network operators and their vendor suppliers automate a unique process to significantly
reduce revenue loss and customer churn caused by system robustness issues.
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How Does It Benefit Me?
Mu delivers a rigorous and highly automated service assurance solution that proactively
improves the security and robustness of any IP-based hardware or
software product throughout its development and/or deployment
lifecycles.
Network operators often have limited visibility into the true reliability, availability and security stance of any IP-based product they are purchasing, deploying or
upgrading. The Mu Test Suite improves the
reliability and uptime of networked products and IP business services by
proactively discovering, and speeding the remediation of, robustness and resiliency shortcomings before systems are
deployed in production environments. As
a result, Mu's growing network operator customer base is avoiding
service outages and reducing customer churn.
Vendors of IP-based products typically lack proactive service assurance expertise and effective automation in the product development or
quality
assurance groups. As a result, products are not properly analyzed before
they are released to network operators. Service
analysis improves the product development process, enabling developers
to produce products and applications that are more robust, reliable and secure.
The Mu Test Suite automates the discovery, isolation and remediation of inherent
weaknesses in the NGN IP Network. Mu's solution delivers significant productivity gains, cost
savings and tangible network availability improvements for network operators while helping vendors build higher quality IP-enabled products.
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How Does It Work?
The Mu Test Suite delivers
numerous proactive service assurance options that result in a high return on
investment for network operators and equipment vendors. The ability to minimize service/network
downtime accelerates the rollout of new and more robust services, thereby
increasing end-user satisfaction and reducing customer churn:
- First is to select which Mu Test Suite modules to use: millions of variations on service traffic; known vulnerabilities or Denial of Service (DoS)
- Second is to dynamically apply one or more of the Mu modules within a customized automated service assurance process for either the network operator or their product suppliers
- Third is to document any discovered weaknesses - soft faults affecting reliability and 0-day issues that could be maliciously exploited; after the issues are isolated, the Mu solution expedites remediation of these weaknesses before they cause unplanned network downtime or poor application quality
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Why Do Network Operators and Product Vendors use Mu?
Product and service weaknesses occur in Network Operator infrastructure with increasing regularity due to the use of standardized and open source software or
hardware. Primary areas are made more reliable available and secure through the use of Mu:
- Product deployment lifecycle states including: Network Architecture Design, Vendor Selection, Security Design and Verification, Security Incident Response Team, Hot Fix & Upgrade Validation, and Product Support & Debugging.
- Product vendor suppliers use Mu to product higher quality releases, regressions and patches as well. Numerous product vendors using Mu including SonicWall and F5 note that their integration of Mu into their respective Software Development Lifecycles (SDLC) saves both time and money while preserving valuable business advantages over competitors.
Other Technical Resources:
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