NetNumen™ AOS: A Powerful Platform to Integrate a Unified Portal and Application Virtualization

Nowadays, telecom operators provide more diverse services, and new applications are emerging to support these services. Those providers offering applications have customized how to use them, how to access them, and what kind of user security model to be created in their own way. This means that operations engineers have to use different accounts to log in to these application systems through different access modes. This complicates system operations, increases the risk of errors, and reduces efficiency. It increases the IT management workload and the potential for security problems.
The traditional PC plus remote access mode has become far from enough in dealing with hundreds of applications. Driven by the transformation towards centralized operations, operators are turning their attention to working on rapid, seamless, and secure ways to access application systems and improve their work efficiency.
Following the next-generation operations idea and riding on the extensive experience in network operations, ZTE has developed the NetNumen™ Advanced Operations Suite (AOS)—a platform with a unified portal and virtualized applications. NetNumen™ AOS is built on ZTE's unified Web development platform and has an advanced, hierarchical and modular software architecture. It consists of two major functional modules:
●  unified portal. It provides users with unified portal management and user security management, including application access configuration management, application grouping management, user authorization and role management, user log management, and user monitoring management.
●  application virtualization. It virtualizes applications, and provides application clustering and load balancing.
NetNumen™ AOS enables multiple application systems to be deployed, maintained, and managed in a centralized manner. It allows users to access and use these application systems, and perform user management and authentication through a single login UI.

ZTE AOS-Based Unified Portal Solution

ZTE has rolled out unified AOS-based portal solution to provide one single access to multiple application systems, including the legacy ones that do not support Web-based access. The solution is as compatible as possible in order to integrate all kinds of legacy application systems and to improve overall security of the system. The solution boasts:
●  powerful system integration.NetNumen™ AOS is integrates and supports B/S application systems and Windows-based C/S application systems, providing them with an efficient application virtualization environment.
●  centralized deployment and reduced IT maintenance cost. Application systems can be centrally installed, managed, and upgraded so that no application program is required on the client. Users can operate and maintain all services easily through a browser, which lowers both the IT maintenance workload and OPEX.
●  secure and reliable image data transport. After a user logs into an application system remotely through the GUI, only image data on UIs rather than service data is transferred to the browser on the client. The data is encrypted during transmission and not stored on the client. This guarantees information security.
●  complete security management. NetNumen™ AOS has centralized user management and authentication and provides complete log management. It uses the HTTPS security protocol to ensure secure system access. It also supports the recording function so that user operations are traceable.

Solution Application

ZTE's unified portal solution has been used in a variety of projects, helping customers solve problems that have been around for years and allowing applications and tools to be deployed and made available rapidly. The solution greatly reduces IT maintenance workload and cost. Users don’t have to install and configure the application program for each tool on the client, and the security of the overall system is strengthened.

 
This solution is available for creating new projects and upgrading existing ones. It supports multiple security mechanisms to meet the demanding security requirements in the telecom industry. Figure 1 and Figure 2 show the logical network architectures before and after upgrade using the ZTE unified portal solution.

In the solution, ZTE makes creative use of the application virtualization and virtual IP technologies supported by NetNumen™ AOS to virtualize the C/S application systems and their runtime environments. The Web-based access mode replaces all the ways we access and use these systems now. As such, the costs for deploying access resources are lowered; the network topology is simplified; and security risks are reduced. Clients for all application systems can be centrally installed and maintained, resulting in much less IT maintenance workload and effort.

Evolution

Application virtualization has changed the traditional PC and remote system access mode. It separates the interaction layer from the computing layer and clusters the computing layer, to provide simple system deployment and a highly secure system. NetNumen™ AOS also has single sign on (SSO), operations recording, load balancing, and clustering, all of which make the solution and system more flexible, reliable, and secure.
As the mobile internet and cloud technologies evolve, ZTE's NetNumen™ AOS has been re-designed to serve as a cloud portal and a mobile portal, which will inevitably become a powerful tool for mobile operations management on a global scale.