DTWS: Telcos treading the path to cloud-native technologies

Deutsche Telekom, Jazz and stc discussed how the move to the public cloud fits into their wider strategic ambition and why they are adopting cloud native technologies during TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World Series. “Things to consider when taking this journey are the safety and security, and the privacy factor. You have to build that confidence and I think we have to educate hyperscalers and build this trust over time,” according to Nabeel Amjad, Head of Cloud and Security Business, Jazz, speaking at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World Series during the session Getting out of your comfort zone: How to embrace cloud as part of your cloud-native journey. Jazz’s motivation for embracing cloud native revolves around making customers’ lives easier “by walking away from MPLS” and providing secure internet connectivity. He said, “As soon as their traffic exits towards the internet or cloud, it is scanned and dealt with at the branch so you don’t have to spend extra investment on your core or aggregation.” The second thing is to add an orchestration layer, “So customers can step up and manage things themselves and at the same time, building a defendable infrastructure for them.” Amjad said. Andreas Terwellen, VP of Risk and Security at Deutsche Telekom, said, “We have to look at which use cases to cloudify”, saying there are three categories. The first is lift and shift “to see what is possible with hyperscalers’ cloud solutions”. The second category is cloud native, “running on Kubernetes and OpenShift variants”. Here he said the issues are around security and how to build loosely coupled platforms. The third category identified by Terwellen is software-as-a-service (SaaS), “using what’s on the market because it could be much cheaper than doing it on our own”. Susan James, Senior Director of Telecommunications Strategy, Red Hat, pointed out that hyperscalers’ infrastructure and availability varies greatly from region to region. She said her company is working to provide, “The components to integrate which provide the surrounding capabilities for [multi-cloud] workloads, which are not necessarily the same.” The approach is “to have a common environment with something like OpenShift deployed on a public cloud. For those who don’t have public cloud available … you can start today with your own private cloud…or get started with things like hosted data centers.” Bader A. Allheib, Infrastructure VP at stc, said for the next six to 12 months: “We need to work with hyperscalers in cooperation instead of competition, so we host our workload either in the private or public cloud, on well-defined criteria based on three main aspects.” He said these are compliance with privacy and security requirments; performance requirements around mission critical applications, customer experience, and edge computing; and to improve agility and time to market through the fast adoption of technology and working on new developments with hyperscalers in joint ventures. Not registered for the Digital Transformation World Series? 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.