Cloud Metro & The Future of Sustainable Networking Infrastructures

Environmental sustainability has become a top agenda item for consumers and companies alike. For service providers, sustainability is an especially important priority because of the impact that growing demands on the network have on energy consumption and carbon emissions.

In the face of new regulations and calls to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, telco providers require new capabilities to improve energy efficiency and support green development while meeting rising consumer demands.?

Organizations must simplify their network architecture, reduce operational costs, and improve overall network performance. The solution? Applying a cloud-based approach.

In partnership with Juniper Networks, Ronald van Loon discussed the benefits of applying cloud principles to architecting, building and operating metro networks to both deliver business growth and consider long-term environmental sustainability.

Juniper Networks’ Cloud Metro is a cloud-delivered routing and switching solution enabling service providers to build scalable, secure, and high-performance networks that help them meet their sustainability goals.

The Importance of Long-Term Network Sustainability

With the growth of cities and increasing need for fast and reliable connectivity, metro networks are the critical infrastructure for the digital economy. It is where connectivity, edge cloud hosting and service experience converge.

However, the traditional and manual metro network is unable to keep up with the demands of modern applications and services. According to ACG Research, new services, apps, and workloads are driving metro traffic growth, expected at 500% from 2021 to 2027.?

There are also numerous environmental sustainability initiatives at play, including:

• International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standards to reduce greenhouse emissions by up to 45% by 2030.?
• GSMA commitments for the mobile industry to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.?
• Eliminate e-waste, space, and inefficient energy designs in traditional metro areas.?

There’s a real opportunity to rethink the traditional metro in a way that will simplify operations and futureproof our networks. For example, implementing eco-friendly practices to products like routers reduce energy, space, and power consumption, and improve hardware longevity.?

Service providers can improve network energy efficiency by optimizing resource utilization, leveraging virtualization technologies, automating routine tasks, and using energy-efficient hardware options. This can help service providers reduce their energy consumption and lower their carbon footprints while still delivering high-quality cloud-based services to their customers.

Cloud-Delivered Automation is the Way of the Future

New cloud metro networks refer to the latest generation of metropolitan area networks (MANs) that are designed to support the high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity needs of cloud-based applications and services. These networks typically use advanced networking technologies such as fiber-optic cables, software-defined networking (SDN), and network function virtualization (NFV) to deliver faster and more reliable connectivity.

AI-enabled automation and cloud capabilities can reduce TCO by up to 71%, extend network cycles, and enable richer services. Cloud metro networks also deliver a number of other benefits:

• Businesses can instantly deliver priority use cases that meet their unique specifications with greater ease of use in provisioning and managing network resources
• AIOps for improved network operations to catch issues before they affect the user.
• Built-in zero-trust security to combat expanded and more sophisticated security threats.
• Improved end-user and employee experience with greater reliability and faster service delivery

Check out Juniper Cloud Metro for more on the future of environmentally-sustainable networking.