Navigating the journey to cloud native

This is an excerpt from our recent report Cloud Migration: Assessing strategies which focuses on the drivers and trends within this industry migration towards cloud native software and what this means for operators and vendors. Download it now for the full insight. There has been an inexorable trend towards the use of cloud in telecoms IT for several years, but it is gathering pace as communications service providers (CSPs) embrace public and hybrid cloud configurations for their operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS). Vendors in these sectors are being driven to redesign their solutions from the ground up, in a cloud native form. The importance of this shift cannot be overstated as CSPs’ requests for information and proposals (RFI/RFPs) often turn the searchlight on software companies’ cloud native credentials. CSPs’ own business transformations mean they need to incorporate cloud’s attributes into their operations to gain: Competitive agility to respond to market opportunity. They must design, launch, and monetize new services quickly and effectively. They are no longer in competition with other telcos but with digital service providers and others too as CSPs seek to participate in B2B2x service ecosystems. Automation, as orchestration-led ecosystems are the norm in the 5G era, the shift to cloud native software is step towards fully automated operations. Scale because the elasticity of the cloud allows not only scaling up of successful service models but failing fast innately encourages a culture of innovation. Economic advantage from setting up new software stacks in multi-cloud deployments which can save CSPs up to 50% on their initial CapEx outlay according to the CTO of one European mobile network operator. 5G monetization because this is where so many forecasts for the 2020s predict growth for CSPs, so monetizing 5G in an optimal way is critical. Non-standalone 5G solutions need mechanisms like dynamic revenue management in readiness for monetizing services using network slices when standalone 5G is deployed.

BSS leads the way to cloud native

Most CSPs still run most of their OSS/BSS on-premise and in their own data centers. Across the gamut of telecoms software functions, there is evidence that BSS segments are often the first to migrate to the cloud. Indeed, within BSS, there are some hot spots for CSPs that are addressing digital service models and value chains. One US Tier 1 OSS/BSS specialist we spoke to during this research said: “BSS is where we are seeing the most bang for our buck in turning to cloud native software and multi-cloud configurations. It’s also where we can most obviously show our customers our IT capabilities; so many cloud-based, front-line systems is a great message.”

Our new report focuses on the drivers and trends within this industry migration towards cloud native software and what this means for operators and vendors, backed up with new opinion polls from TM Forum’s latest Digital Transformation Tracker survey.

Cloud vs. cloud native

The terms "cloud" and "cloud native" are often used in an inconsistent way, but they mean very different things and it’s important to understand the distinction as here cloud native represents much more than a different form of hosting.

Cloud native describes container-based environments: Cloud native technologies are used to develop applications built with services packaged in containers, deployed as microservices and managed on elastic infrastructure through Agile DevOps processes and continuous delivery workflows. Containers isolate an application and its dependencies in a self-contained unit that can run anywhere. In this environment, hardware and operating systems are virtualized, which means the same operating system is shared with other hosted applications. Cloud deployments that are not cloud native are traditional IT applications which are hosted in a cloud but to all intents and purpose could be the same as legacy systems hosted in an on-premise server in a data center. In a traditional IT environment, operations teams manually allocate infrastructure resources to applications. In a cloud native environment, applications are deployed on infrastructure that abstracts the underlying compute, storage and networking primitives. Cloud native platforms automatically handle many tasks (scheduling, lifecycle management, scaling, load balancing, discovery, etc.) through the software tools that manage the containers.