Cloud Computing has made an enormous impact on the telecom industry. It has reduced operational and administrative costs for the telecom sectors and maintained a unified communication and collaboration with a massive Content Delivery Network. Cloud service providers allow telecom sectors to focus on essential business services rather than IT, server updates, or maintenance issues.
Cloud Computing has significantly increased the reach of telecommunications across the world using advanced technologies. Some of its benefits include:
- Cloud Delivery Model:?The platform delivers IT and communication services over any network (fixed, mobile, worldwide coverage) and can be used by any end-user-connected devices, such as smartphones, PCs, televisions, etc.
- Communication Services:?It delivers a vast range of communication services, such as audio calls and conferences, video calls and conferences, messaging, broadcasting, etc.
- Network Services:?It provides high-grade network services, such as VPN, L4-L7 connections, etc., to ensure secure and high-performance services with end-to-end quality assurance for end users.?
Cloud Computing can benefit itself by providing cloud services to telecom sectors. Some of its benefits include:
- Reduction in costs:?Using cloud computing, service providers can provide software at lower rates with the help of virtualization and provisioning software, allocating efficient computing resources, thus reducing hardware costs as well.
- Highly scalable and flexible infrastructure:?A vast scalable engine delivers building highly scalable and flexible infrastructure for users and partners, meeting the peak loads and seasonal variations demands.
- Efficient and flexible resource allocation and management:?Using virtualization technology in cloud computing, cloud service providers can use flexible and efficient resources, such as IT, server, storage, network, etc.
Cloud Computing has significantly increased several telecom industries’ business revenues by providing efficient and effective operations, leading to advanced technologies. Some of its benefits include:
- Reduction in costs:?As previously mentioned, cloud computing helps in the reduction of operating costs of software and hardware resources, thus increasing the infrastructure’s efficiency and scalability.
- Data Centers:?Cloud computing improves data centres’ efficiency and server utilisation through the collaboration between cloud service providers and telecom sectors.
- Scalable engine:?Cloud service providers deliver a massively scalable engine to build scalable and flexible services to improve the business performance and revenue of telecom sectors.
- Pay-per-use payment model:?Cloud service providers offer pay-as-you-go payment models where telecom sectors only need to pay for the services they utilised or subscription-based pricing.
- Low migration costs:?If the telecom sectors (customers) are not satisfied with the cloud service, it is quite easy to migrate to a new solution by simple signing a new contract, transferring or migrating data, and retraining the customers at minimal costs.
- Service-mobility:?Cloud services can be used by anyone who has internet access to devices that are not only desktops but also by mobile phones. It results in growing your business across the globe.
- Securing important data:?Cloud computing offers data backup, where it allows telecom sectors to backup, store, and secure their critical data in multiple locations to carry on with the business immediately, although there is a natural disaster.
- Eco-friendly technology:?Telecommunications and cloud computing together help to develop eco-friendly technologies.?
Cloud is a key element of the modernization of telecom networks and services. But to succeed with cloud computing in telecom, operators should know several tips. These are best practices experts in telecom and cloud have been building for years:
- Clarify your business need:?specify the goal you want to achieve as a result of implementing cloud computing in your telecom company: reduce costs, enter new markets, improve customer experience, improve time-to-market, etc.
- Gather a team of skilled experts:?when you have a clearly defined goal, you need to find a team of skilled experts who will help you achieve it. The best option is to partner with a reliable tech partner who has experience in cloud migration and cloud-native development in telecom.
- Conduct a Discovery Phase:?shape business requirements, create a work breakdown structure, design a product backlog, estimate TCO and the profitability you will gain in the short term and in the long run.
- Decide on the cloud strategy:?choose the best deployment model: public, private, or hybrid clouds, select the most suitable approach: single cloud or multicloud, settle on the cloud provider (s).
- Create a clear migration plan:?it should include your goals, costs estimates, timelines, services and technology to use, etc.?
- Choose a VNF migration strategy:?define which network functions need to remain as VMs and which can be re-architected as cloud-native microservices.?
- Assess and prioritize your apps, processes, and operations:?understand app dependencies; categorize your apps into mission-critical applications, business-critical applications, customer-facing applications, and other non-critical apps; define operations that can be automated; simplify processes so that they consist of fewer steps.
- Adopt microservices architecture:?transform your monolith architecture into a number of loosely coupled?microservices?to be able to quickly develop, test, and deploy new features and fixes without impacting other components of the application.
- Make use of containers:?Containers make it easy to move applications between environments while retaining full functionality. They also make it possible to build and run scalable applications across public, private, and hybrid clouds.
- Leverage edge computing:?edge computing is among the top?telecom trends. Telcos should make use of edge networks to reduce latency and improve network performance by bringing workloads closer to the users who need to access them. As opposed to the content delivery network (CDN), which is considered to be the predecessor of edge computing and?only stores cached data, edge networks, by contrast, can accommodate a wider array of functionality (they can store and process data in real-time) and device types.?
- Choose the right?application migration method:?re-host (lift and shift), re-platform (lift, tinker and shift), modernize, rewrite, drop and shop, retain.
- Take care of your data:?move your data to the cloud carefully, protecting the personal information of your customers; make use of your structured and unstructured data; apply statistical models as well as ML&AI to help businesses identify patterns, predict outcomes, enable fraud prevention, prevent equipment failures, etc.
- Ensure high-level security of your apps in the cloud:?adopt DevSecOps approach, make necessary configurations, train others on how to maintain security in the cloud;
- Make use of DevOps best practices:?CI/CD, rolling updates, monitoring, alerting, unified logging,?IaC, network load balancing, etc.
- Monitor the results and optimize costs:?apply metrics and KPIs defined on the planning stage to see the benefits of the cloud, maintain and support cloud to gain better results.
