So in this section, we're going to talk about meeting the service assurance challenge to NFV. And specifically, we're going to talk about the platform service assurance capabilities that Intel architecture management technologies provide, and how they can be used to provide platform telemetry to serve as assurance layers in the platform. So let's remind ourselves of why the network is being virtualized in the first place. So the massive influx of devices and use cases coming with IoT and 5G is putting tremendous pressure on next generation infrastructure. The network really must scale to support billions of devices and a wide variety of use cases. The amount of global annual data continues to rise, almost doubling annually. And by 2019, a Cisco report estimates that two zetabytes of traffic will be transversing the global networks annually. All of these factors together mean that service providers really have to transform the way they build and operate their networks. They will be using techniques of virtualization and software-defined infrastructure and cloud techniques to build networks which are more cost-effective to build and run, which are more flexible and allow greater innovation. So today, the network is largely composed of purpose-built infrastructure, with each device containing its own management software. So you'll see separate pieces of infrastructure or separate appliances for functions like routing and Virtual Private Networking and firewalls. This makes it very difficult for operators to deploy new services at speed, as each device needs to be individually provisioned and tested and put into the network, which is a very time-consuming and complex process. The network of tomorrow will be deployed using NFV and SDN. Instead of a separate router, VPN, and firewall on three different pieces of hardware, you can run all three on the same Intel architecture-based infrastructure. This will have obvious capex benefits of consolidating free hardware purchases into one. And then when you add software-defined networking, you start to add a degree of intelligence and flexibility to your network provision that can greatly reduce operating costs as well. The result is that networks will be scalable enough to cope with next generation demands on the number of devices and the amount of traffic, and they will provide a level of performance and complexity that can support a variety of use cases with very different require requirements on the infrastructure. Now, this won't be a binary transition. So traditional infrastructure and new NFV-based infrastructure will need to coexist in the network for a number of years to come.
