Journey to an autonomous, cloud native network

This is the second article in a series from a new white paper published by TM Forum’s Digital Organization Transformation collaboration team, looking at the 10 digital transformation journeys companies must make. The first article introduced the white paper, which draws on Martin Creaner’s Ten Transformation Journeys and the real-world experience of several communications service providers (CSPs).

As noted in the introductory article, transformation journeys can be grouped logically into four areas: technology, digital services, operations and customer engagement. It is critical that CSPs proactively manage the interdependencies between different journeys and orchestrate them in parallel.

While transformational success is not only a technology challenge, four of the 10 journeys involve technology. Here we look at two:

• Journey to an autonomously managed, virtualized communications and cloud infrastructure


• Journey to a uniformly orchestrated security-centric enterprise

Journey to an autonomously managed, virtualized communications and cloud infrastructure

This journey addresses three major management challenges most operators’ face in their current network architectures: remote management of multiple generations of discreet network elements; inability to scale; and lack of automation. Most CSPs have hundreds of operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS), and integrating them with new management systems is a complex and expensive undertaking. Configuring new requirements from customers and scaling such networks is also a costly, slow and manual process.

A new management challenges this brings is choosing the right technical standards, including whether to adopt open source standards from a cluster of new vendors or stick with well-proven, major infrastructure providers, although some of these have started to include open source solutions like Open RAN within their portfolios.

To address the challenges, operators are embracing network virtualization and moving support applications to the cloud. The benefits of doing so include:

• Autonomous network management of multiple network elements at scale


• Acceleration of time-to-market for new services


• Agility and flexibility in network scaling (for example, for special events and customer self-service)


• Reduced OpEx


• Ability to fully utilize and optimize the capabilities of 5G

Globe Telecom is a good case study showing the benefits of embracing a cloud native approach. The company implemented cloud-native service assurance and migrated the mission-critical capability to the public cloud – a first in Southeast Asia – while also evolving use cases and processes from network performance to service quality management.

The CSP was challenged by a proliferation of silos across its IT estate (in 2016, Globe Telecom had more than 10 systems supporting management of network performance alone) and a lack of cross-functional support systems, which led to delays.

To embrace converged, cross-domain network and service management Globe Telecom had to integrate systems across its entire network and IT estate, as well as supporting cross-functional use cases across network, service, customer and IT operations. The company partnered with a supplier offering a cloud native service assurance solution, MYCOM OSI, and leveraged the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture and Open APIs.

The results (show below) are impressive and led to the team being selected as the winners of a TM Forum Excellence Award in the Cloud Native IT & Agility category:

Journey to a uniformly orchestrated, security-centric enterprise

In addition to challenges inherent in the current network and services delivery model, CSPs are grappling simultaneously with a rapid evolution to architectures that can support 5G, cloud and IoT. In short, they must embrace change while also supporting a heterogeneous legacy mix of older technologies, network architectures and skills. Challenges in doing so include:

• Managing the vastly increased cybersecurity threat perimeter inherent in a software-defined cloud network architecture and large amounts of customer data


• Managing and patching the security vulnerabilities of a large legacy IT estate made up of multiple generations of diverse applications and discrete network elements from different vendors


• Coping with the security vulnerabilities presented by billions of IoT devices from numerous vendors


• Dealing with the complexity and potential security shortcomings of thousands of ecosystem partners


• Creating a security-conscious culture and behaviors among all employees so that the management of security becomes a central transformation consideration

The new management challenges in a uniformly orchestrated security-centric enterprise are technical, commercial and cultural. On the technical side, the nature of threats, threat boundaries and cybersecurity technologies continue to evolve at a rapid pace. Since a critical mass of up-to-date cybersecurity skills is needed for every software application, radical simplification of the IT estate can reduce costs significantly and deliver a uniform and maintainable level of strong cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity threats extend into the ecosystem of telco partners, so these threats need to be managed commercially as well as technically (for example, by insisting that relevant security standards are central to procurement of both services and technology).

Human behavior is often the weakest link in security, and this often requires significant cultural change as well as training in new technical skills. An excellent approach to cultural change in security can be found in the UK Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure’s Embedding Security Behaviours: using the 5Es, a framework for improving security behavior within organizations.

The benefits of a uniformly orchestrated security policy include:

• The ability to maintain service level agreements for all customers


• Protection of customers’ and employees’ data


• Protection of corporate reputation and brand value, and avoidance of fines (for example, fines up to 4% of turnover are possible under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.


• Avoidance of the significant costs (human and financial) associated with crisis management


• The ability to offer security services to customers

In the next article in this series, we’ll look at the Journey to a uniformly orchestrated, data-centric enterprise.