When it comes to the cloud, the telecom industry has been all talk and no action. A glance to our colleagues in the enterprise IT world shows us how far our industry is lagging behind in our transition to the public cloud. By moving large workloads to the public cloud, telcos can harness the single biggest innovation to come to IT application management in the last ten years, and with it reap massive cost savings.
Over the past few years, many enterprises have engaged with Google Cloud, AWS and Azure. For example, Salesforce uses GCP and AWS to host their application services, and Twitter recently moved to AWS. But we have not heard of “big cloud deals” in our industry. We seem to be stuck in the ’90s of application management — virtualising servers, rather than embracing what is the biggest technology change of the decade: managing IT stacks in the public cloud.
When I talk to providers, the conversation often starts with “Isn’t private cloud the same as public cloud?” In short: Not even close. Private cloud should be considered for organisations with money to burn: a lot of effort with little savings. To get the big savings, you have to go all the way to the public cloud.
There are three primary benefits of the public cloud:
First, cost savings. When you think about an IT application like BSS/OSS like Optiva offers, often only the licence cost and maintenance fees are considered. The total cost of ownership (TCO) is far larger and includes the cost of installation, database licenses, hardware, networking resources, power, management time and so on. The public cloud makes all those requirements obsolete, allowing CSPs to reduce the TCO by up to 80%.
Second, elasticity. As our industry gears up for widespread 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT), processing power and data storage requirements will increase exponentially. Exactly how much you need and how quickly you need it – no one knows. Getting ready for the peak data demands of these unknown quantities will be an expensive guess. By leveraging auto-scaling capabilities of the public cloud, you’ll pay only for what you need when you need it, changing the economics from scary to manageable.
Third, innovation. The reality is that hyperscale web companies out-gun CSPs in terms of their research and development (R&D) and spending on data centres. Google has spent more than US$30 billion to build data centres to support its public cloud. It also spends more than US$3 billion annually on cloud security. CSPs cannot match that level of investment or the pace of Google’s innovation. Instead of fighting it, CSPs should use Google’s investments to their advantage.
As an outsider coming into this industry, it was shocking to me that more CSPs haven’t figured out the benefits of the public cloud before now. We can confidently say that 2019 will be a turning point regarding CSPs’ engagement with the public cloud, as we know that a number of progressive operators will go public about their use of the public cloud this year.
Question is: are you ready to move to the public cloud? If you’re not talking to Optiva, my guess is probably not.
Meet Optiva at Mobile World Congress to discuss your plan for moving to the public cloud.
