Tips to Get the Best Firmware Management Solution in the Market

Nowadays, all MSOs welcome automation of repetitive tasks that are executed manually. They know that such tasks imply a recurrent operative cost and every day become less efficient due to multiple factors, such as network growth.

One of the most time-consuming tasks is the firmware management and update of the devices across the network. These activities are usually performed manually or with tools developed in-house, which were designed to fill a need in a timely manner. But when dealing with network growth and increasingly repetitive maintenance tasks, it becomes a very complex process that requires a lot of effort to complete the activities using those legacy tools.

Most Common Challenges With Firmware Management

For sure, when using in-house developments or updating or managing firmware manually, MSO will face:

• Complex manual configuration of firmware update policies.
• Batch run due to restraining tools.
• Multiple maintenance windows, generally at night. Those activities add more operative cost and an extra charge on the Operations area.
• Información on multiple, unconsolidated databases or spreadsheets, which are difficult to organize over long periods of time. This situation adds complexity to the process because the maintenance of those sources of information is very complicated.
• Absence of automatic detection of devices without standardized firmware versions, leading to uncapping and cloning.
• Limited or null visibility on the progress of firmware update tasks.
• Absence of troubleshooting tools to minimize service outage.

Firmware Management Solution Key Functionalities to Lookout For

It is possible to solve the challenges pointed above and many more with a solution that offers the flexibility to split the execution of upgrading processes in an easy way and shows reports and visibility related to the progress and efficiency of tasks, historical information and other functions such as estimates of the whole process.

In my opinion, these are the key functionalities a tool for upgrading firmware should have:

• Configuration of flexible upgrade policies based on manufacturer/model/firmware, location on the network, and MAC Address.
• Definition of schedule for the task and number of devices to update.
• Having statistics in real time for each running task and final reports with the result of the task, error rate and devices could not be updated.
• Real-time notifications or alarms before execution of tasks that have an error rate higher than a configured threshold, or notifications in real time if the processing of the task exceeds a certain amount of errors.
• IPv4/IPv6 support ready since the migration to IPv6 is a fact in many MSOs and it is vital that the tool allows them to manage updates on both protocols.
• Updated inventory of devices that allows MSOs to understand which manufacturer/model/firmware of devices exist on their network.

Conclusion

To sum up, I can say that if you are looking for a tool that allows you to optimize the normalization of firmware versions that exist on your network, these would be the main features that will allow you to eliminate manual intervention in the execution of these tasks. Moreover, you will obtain multiple benefits that will let you detect errors quickly and minimize the impact that this generates in the quality of the end customer service.

Within Intraway’s portfolio of solutions, the Automatic Firmware Management solution provides all of the features mentioned above, and it is agnostic to your provisioning platform. Check it out today here or read more of our content on firmware management.