Reliability Isn't Added.
It's Engineered In.
HCLTech's Network Reliability Engineering (NRE) practice brings the discipline of software reliability engineering to enterprise networks—treating infrastructure as code, operations as a product and uptime as a measurable engineering commitment.
By combining NetDevOps, observability, GitOps and Agentic AI, NRE moves network operations from reactive, manual execution to intelligent, self-healing operations. The expected outcomes are higher availability, faster change velocity and lower cost to operate—measured, not claimed.
Networks have outgrown the way we run them. Environments are now multi-vendor, hybrid and software-defined, changing faster than manual operations can safely keep pace with—so failures have moved from hardware to configuration, change and human process.
At the same time, downtime has become a board-level financial risk, the talent to manage this complexity is thinning and alert noise is burying the signals that matter. NRE answers this by treating reliability as an engineering outcome, not an operational afterthought.
From execution to intelligence
Reliability is becoming a business KPI, talent is shifting toward reliability engineers, observability is replacing traditional monitoring and an automation-first approach is spreading across network operations. Analysts expect rapid and broad adoption through the rest of the decade.
Reliability Delivered in a Phased Approach
A phased engagement model moves network operations from assessment to a self-healing, AI-driven state—building reliability in de-risked stages that each deliver value while compounding toward autonomy, up to 30–35% MTTR/MTTD gains and 45–50% toil reduction.
Phase 1 | Assess & Baseline (1–3 months) |
Focus | Establish the NRE foundation and baseline current maturity. |
Key activities | NRE assessment; tools & process review; observability gap analysis; skill-gap & training plan; define NetDevOps goals aligned to SLO or SLI. |
Outcomes | Source of Truth, KPI dashboards and a costed roadmap. |
Phase 2 | Foundation (2–6 months) |
Focus | Stand up automation, observability and reliability processes. |
Key activities | SoT creation; telemetry-based observability; gold config templates; NetDevOps pipeline & change management; agentic PoC. |
Outcomes | 50% self-healing, MTTR/MTTD baselining, NRE squads. |
Phase 3 | Maturity & Beyond (3–6 months) |
Focus | Scale to predictive, AI-driven ZeroOps. |
Key activities | SSOT expansion; chaos engineering; GitOps maturity; maturing AIOps use cases; policy orchestration via AI Force.ITOps. |
Outcomes | 30–35% MTTR/MTTD gains, 45–50% toil reduction, end-to-end observability. |
