Guidelines to manage your own MPLS service providers

Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks are good for providing Virtual Private Network (VPN) services to the customers and works as an attractive alternative option for the VPN services in a multi-vendor environment. By configuring VPN appliances individually, you can offer account limits to each customers and it becomes easy to handle number of clients also.

Mention all network boundaries: Dominant service provider gives single point of responsibility to manage MPLS services. There is a need to recognize all the network boundaries so that they can be handled with an ease. Once the points on different boundaries are identified then they can establish an integrate relation between all the sites. An integration policy is setup to cover all the FCAPS points. Both parties should convert the starting point of all the boundaries into integration policies plan.

Monitor the network boundaries: Security becomes an important issue in the process of adequate management system to cover all the sites evenly. It becomes important to recognize the needs of operators to provide the critical interconnection between the two boundaries. If there is a lack of reasonable data at a given point of any boundary then the whole system goes in hibernate-condition to overcome the issue of security.

Manage service level agreements with the service providers: Service level agreement becomes an important factor to maintain the relationship between service provider and clients enjoying the service. Apart from the boundary monitoring issue, maintaining multi-provider network is also important to manage the service level agreement.

 

Service level agreement is easy when there are many countries involved in the process of propagation of data at various point. However, if only one country is involved, then problem can be noticed and Quality of Service may reduce, resulting in low signal strength of data transmission. It is necessary to show the arbitration clause into an SLA to define the boundary of organization and country. Otherwise, there would be risk of contract issue on different boundaries to maintain the service level agreement.

Today, most companies can’t avoid multi-provider network issue and they have to access the data transmission on the behalf of other network boundaries. The working network becomes more common and complicated with the time that it becomes a tough task to handle. Therefore, careful steps should be taken to manage service level agreement and to maintain the Quality of Services.