Telco Cloud Journey

What is Telco Cloud?

Before we go in and understand what a Telco Cloud is, let’s spend a couple of minutes understanding what made Telco Cloud come into existence in the telecommunications world. Cloud architecture made its foray into the IT world a bit early than it made its authority in telco.

Earlier telecommunication systems were proprietary and purpose-built systems developed on a monolithic architecture. These systems ensured that telcos or enterprise entities were struck in a vendor lock-in model, scaling up on different telco-grade applications was time-sensitive, and innovation and automation depended on strategies adopted by OEMs. But time has shown us how telecommunication systems have fundamentally changed and evolved for good.

According to VMWare: “A telco cloud represents the data center resources that are required to deploy and manage a mobile phone network with data transfer capabilities by carrier companies in production operations at scale.”

Now, we have core networks running on cloud-native virtualized or containerized systems on COTS-based hardware, which is vendor agnostic, RAN systems have now made open and mostly software-driven, automation and innovation are ensuring scaling up of systems effortlessly.

We are also witnessing a steady change in the cloud architecture also. The earlier cloud revolution in telco started with virtualization concepts like virtual machines and is now evolving to more mature and robust systems like containers and microservices.

The advent of these changes is mostly triggered by the introduction of 5G systems which are more latency-sensitive and cater to more use-cases. For the time being, it is expected that both the VM and containers will tend to coexist, with containers coming up to the center stage in the future.

Ok, now that we have got a brief idea of what Telco cloud is doing to the industry, let’s try to seek a quick answer to this very imperative question.

What is the difference between IT cloud and Telco Cloud?

Essentially both IT cloud and Telco cloud are built on the same framework of having a software-defined network (SDN) and abstraction of hardware by using NFV and cloud-native technology. To enable scale of applications with business needs, both the clouds need a pedigree of automation and orchestration.

Why is Telco Cloud Important?

Telco cloud emerged as it solved some of the fundamental problems being faced by operators, as highlighted below. The introduction of telco clouds helped to resolve most of these challenges. The challenge of scalability and network flexibility was resolved by introducing virtualization, resolving the challenge faced by purpose-built hardware.

• Scalability and Network Flexibility – Existing telecom network didn’t scale with traffic explosion.
• Adoption of new technologies – Network architecture was not built to be future ready to adapt to new technologies.
• Vendor Lock-In – Operators in monolithic architecture were dependent on only specific vendors, and they didn’t have the leverage to pick and choose from different vendors.
• Speed of Adoption and Automation – CSPs due to lack of automation and orchestration were plagued in their Go to market commitments.

This means the same hardware can be used for different telecom applications. This is playing and will play a crucial role in deploying new edge technologies and 5G. The focus of telco cloud on creating a common virtualized infrastructure paves the way for automation and artificial intelligence opportunities as well.

Key Technical Touchpoints in Telco Cloud

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) – Network function virtualization is the process to virtualize different network functions like routers, MME, SGSN and AMF into functions or SW modules running as Virtual Machines (VM). Earlier there was a need for separate HW for all these components to run in silos on purpose-built Hardware. One of the important aspects of NFV is that the operators can leverage it to scale up a new type of services and applications on demand without the need for additional hardware.

Containers – While NFV helped to virtualize with help of VMs, with the advancement of technology containers also came into the picture. This helped in a transition from NFV to a more lightweight kubernetes based platform. Containers are lightweight software packages that have all the dependencies required to run an application.

Phases of Telco Cloud Native Journey

Before we go into the different phases and strategies a CSP needs to take to revamp its network towards a Cloud Native Systems, it’s imperative to understand what “Cloud Native “means. Cloud-native is a concept that refers to the process of building and running applications to leverage the advantages of cloud infrastructure.

The cloud-native applications are built to scale, be elastic, resilient, and flexible, allowing organizations to run these applications on private, public, or hybrid clouds. The cloud-native developments are complemented by features like containers, Kubernetes, microservices, and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

For a Telco to be successful in its Cloud-native journey, it should understand new Cloud-oriented business models and new opportunities coming from the B2B and B2C segments. For a Telco to be successful in this journey, it needs to be surrounded by the right mix of partners and vendors who share the same vision and drive to execute the transformation.

Each Telco’s journey will be unique and will be based on business motivation and, therefore will have a different starting point to becoming a full Cloud-Native Telco.

See the cloud-native journey tables,  figures and time-tested path to cloud-native solution in the 5G Magazine.

Telco challenges to cloud-native journey

A Telco needs to meander across multiple challenges during its migration to a Cloud-native architecture. The cloud journey usually starts with replacing large network elements with VNFs. 

But there are additional challenges too:

• Migration of Applications: Many Telco applications might not be custom built to run on a cloud platform, so those needs to be redesigned or recreated before cloud migration.
• Security of Data: The Telco database carries huge customer data, and when migrating to the cloud, it should ensure there is no security breach.
• Latency: Most Telco applications are latency sensitive, so there is a challenge for the Cloud infra to provide telecommunications-grade latency, which can ensure maintaining of Quality of Service.
• Vendor Lock-In: Once the Telco puts its network on the cloud, be it private or public cloud, it is the Telco cloud vendor which, in most cases, will own the infrastructure. So, there can be changes when the Telco can be at the mercy of one Telco Cloud vendor. The best way is to have an open ecosystem based on open standards.

Recommendations to mitigate the challenges

• Collaboration with integration vendors: In a multi-vendor environment the best possible way for integration and implementation of new technology is to be surrounded by vendors who share the same vision and strategy for implementation. This helps in making the process much smooth and time efficient.
• Choose a Multi-Vendor Cloud vendor: To have flexibility and freedom in customizing the network, the best possible strategy for a Telco is to opt for multi-vendor Cloud infrastructure.
• Container as a Service (CaaS): To support new use cases coming from 5G, the Telco should implement Cloud-native solutions like containers and microservices based architecture. This will give the Telcos a two-edged advantage in form of scalability and automation.

What should be the Telco strategy for successful Telco Cloud deployments?

Transformation of the network towards the cloud is a journey, and the most intricate part of it is taking the first step. The whole journey transformation journey will depend on how the strategies were framed. Analyzing the transformation of several CSPs, we have managed to formulate a strategy that can be adopted by Telcos while formulating their migration path. It starts with:

Cloud Virtualization

Virtualization is essentially the first step towards cloudification. Generally, it starts with VNFs, and it facilitates hardware consolidation by making applications run on generic hardware. But still, we can’t call it as a pure cloud as the VNFs are siloed. The most generic pathway from this will be migration to containers-based architecture and finally to a cloud-native goal.

Deploying Telco Cloud Automation

After a strategy is formulated for the cloudification of the network, the next approach is to choose a proper tool for automation. Cloud deployment will mean complex network architecture and the need for a skilled workforce to maintain and run the network. So a strategy to choose a proper tool for automation is a defining factor.

Partnership

A telco cloud is built on collaboration from multiple hardware and software vendors. The CSPs should strategies the choice and working of these vendors as the success of this evolution will depend on how well partners collaborate to reach a common objective.

Introduction of Services – 

The CSPs should be very clear about the different services they want to deploy on the cloud architecture. ROI will depend on how well these services will be channelized to generate new revenue streams.