In today’s digital environment, even short periods of network downtime can result in frustrated employees, angry customers, and the loss of millions in revenue. That elevation in business risk has pushed today’s network operations professionals into the spotlight – one where the temperature is hot and there’s little room for error or delays.
With advancements in computing and machine learning, reductions in network downtime have been achieved by preemptively identifying and addressing issues before they manifest into habitual pain points. Historically, teams have leveraged internal sources of data to power these insights. Unfortunately, those efforts have limitations in the incredibly complex and nuanced mechanics of an infrastructure.
Weather To The Rescue
Today, leading teams are deploying a new weapon in their analytics arsenal – weather. Leveraged as a contextual input, historical weather observations in conjunction with existing network operations metrics is a proven win for dissecting network downtime events. For example, imagine that the network is experiencing higher than normal latency and basic analysis concludes the cause is still mostly undetermined. With today’s toolsets, weather data can be deployed without human intervention to quickly determine that an increase in humidity, for example, correlates with this increased latency – driven by humidity’s impact on the attenuation of the signal. Once confirmed, those findings can be leveraged into an operations plan that responds proactively to forecasts calling for high humidity, provisioning resources ahead of expected situations. Informed employees, no high latency, and happy customers. What was once a reactive situation eventually evolves into a PROACTIVE and even PREDICTIVE scenario.
While most weather can be forecast into the future, many operations teams are also leveraging a visual and real-time weather component into their toolset. By integrating weather map overlays into dashboards, operators are able to see conditions evolving before their eyes and in correlation with their physical assets in the field. Imagine the visual representation of lighting strikes approaching your critical infrastructure in real-time and implementing the corresponding response in advance of the storm. Visualizations improve operational awareness and allow engineers to improve predictive models by viewing correlations in real time.
AerisWeather On The Front Lines
At AerisWeather, we’ve developed the products, toolkits, and documentation to support those product managers and developers tasked with responding to a dynamic and digital world. And while we’ve historically worked with many of the more obvious weather-sensitive departments and industries, it’s network operations where we’ve seen previously manual delayed responses transformed into proactive solutions. The opportunities for integrating weather data into your business or application are increasing everyday.
Sign-up for a free developer subscription at AerisWeather and give us a test-drive. If you like what you see, please reach out by contacting our sales team, subscribing to our blog, or following us on Twitter.
Reach out to AerisWeather’s Account Executive team for more information at 952-260-3100 or by clicking here.
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