DTWS: Globe Telecom CIO shares gains and challenges of cloud migration

Globe Telecom took a lead on migrating infrastructure to the public cloud seven years ago when it put in place a cloud-first policy. Since then, cloud adoption has allowed Globe Telecom to slash provisioning times, reduce cost of ownership and increase uptime. But there have been bumps along the road, as Carlo Malana, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Globe Telecom, explained in his keynote presentation at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World Series. When Globe Telecom, which operates in the Philippines, first began cloud migration “we were just so glad to get our provisioning from something like, 80 days … [to] five days,” said Malana, speaking during the second week of TM Forum's Digital Transformation World Series. Then, once the telco started moving to the public cloud in 2016, “we were able to … get our provisioning reduced to about a couple of days.” One of the advantages of cloud infrastructure is its flexibility, which removed headaches linked to forecasting, explained Malana. “If you forecast … you have to make sure that you are purchasing at capacity, way, way ahead of time. And if you miss your forecast, lead times are long. With cloud you can start investing [and] you're able to adjust a lot more quickly.” Other business benefits of cloud adoption include "quite a bit of reduction in our total cost of ownership, [and] we've seen quite an increase in our uptime compared to our bare metal setup before.” There are also upsides when it comes to working with enterprise customers, said Malana. “We like to make sure that ... the technologies we're recommending for our ... enterprise customers are some of the things that we've also tested,” said Malana. “We can say we can put things in the cloud, securely safely reliably and have shown that that solution works for us.” Sourcing cloud-ready applications Being a relatively early adopter, however, meant that many applications were not ready for the cloud when Globe Telecom began its migration. “When we first started, some of these applications still did not have … cloud native type architectures. We could do a lift and shift and move some of the processing and some of the storage virtually, but it still did not take full advantages of the cloud.” As cloud adoption becomes more mainstream, however, this is changing. “There's always the limitation of applications, and that still exists today,” he said. But as “some of the applications start to mature, … we're able to continue our cloud journey which … I really do think is going to be going on for the next few years.” In addition, Globe Telecom faced the internal cultural challenges that are common to communication service providers [CSPs] worldwide. “Being a telco you always think about telco grade … and so it's kind of tough … where you're offloading some of those responsibilities to another entity. I think … the first step is … being able to understand that yes, you can trust someone else with your service, and as a telco definitely we had to go through that journey internally.” There are also issues that are specific to CSPs in emerging markets. Malana used to work for AT&T. “In the US, nobody talks about latency," he said. “In the Philippines … our choices are limited, we have to cross the ocean, we have to rely on submarine cables … and ensure we have strong network redundancy in terms of reaching the closest points in the region. But we mitigate that through a good plan for reliability resiliency, and so we're able to utilize cloud in a very reliable manner.” Watch the keynote interview on driving growth through cloud and connectivity here. Note: Registration to the Digital Transformation World Series is required to watch the recording. Not registered yet? There’s still time. Register here to get access to all the keynotes, panel discussions and master classes. Communication service providers can register for free. The event platform closes on Friday 29 October.