Rise of the smart infrastructure management empire: How to increase control over your vital assets in 7 steps

With 5 to 6 nines standards for reliability, no one can afford a management type operating in the dark. Disastrous events that have occurred over the past years, like the Ice Storm of 1998, the Blackout of 2003 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, make us realize that intelligent monitoring is crucial for the prevention and maintenance of a healthy telecom network in regional power outage conditions. Intelligent monitoring is also important due to continual changing telecommunications business practices and challenges. Increasing efforts are centered on maintaining and upgrading network reliability while also reducing human resources, managing the loss of expertise with retiring workforce and reducing budgets allocated to power infrastructure maintenance routines. Due to the scope of work required, this management must be considered as an empire to rule. The control over the "State of the Network" can be increased by optimizing the management of the existing infrastructure in seven steps. Each step listed below illustrates the best practices to master and improve energy infrastructures guarding against uncontrollable natural phenomena and facilitating disaster recoveries. Most of these practices are, in some measure, currently used by telecom operators. However, these practices are often isolated and not integrated, limiting the efficiency between departments and network specialists. These steps must be integrated into a global strategy offering a broadened perspective to the growing telecom industry and mastering network control. How to proceed? The purpose of this paper is to present a new integrated approach, a solution to unify all actions in order to develop and offer smart infrastructure management.