Communications service providers (CSPs) are transforming their operations to become cloud native but in spite of their best efforts they remain immigrants. How will they make themselves feel at home, asks George Malim?
Cloud native describes a new breed of technology business born and operating in the cloud and that description seems to exclude the often century-old carriers that still provide the majority of the world’s connectivity. However, change is underway and CSPs are committing to their cloud transformations. Whether they become natives remains to be seen.
“There’s a lot of progress in brownfield deployments, and of course all the new deployments are largely based in software elements,” confirms Maria Lema, the co-founder of Weaver Labs. “Vendors are working on building cloudnative solutions, therefore CSPs will adopt more and more as the equipment vendors move towards fully cloud native as well. There’s a lot of legacy tech still, and there will be for a very long time, so we expect hybrid solutions to be the best deployment option now.”
Andreas Gabriel, the chief technology officer of Beyond Now, sees cloud adoption in IT but acknowledges CSPs are still early on in their cloud native adoption cycles. “CSPs have widely embraced cloud native technologies to enable their digital transformation journeys, replacing IT systems with applications that can exploit the flexibility, agility and scale of the cloud,” he says. “The benefits are widely acknowledged, in fact, Gartner predicts that cloud native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives. Whether it’s about adding value or creating ownership, CSPs rely on the cloud to offer simplicity and scalability to their business portfolios.”
“It’s been a slow process for CSPs, and many are still at the beginning of their cloud native journey,” he adds. “A recent Analysys Mason report found that no CSP is truly cloud native at scale. Only a small number are ready to operationalise and scale up but even so, technology and business models remain as the current roadblocks. Technology especially is a major obstacle as CSPs are missing the flexible, dynamic platforms to help manage, orchestrate and monetise the complexity of innovating and launching joint offerings.”
Others fear that, away from brown and greenfield deployments, only slow progress in being made. “The truth is I don’t think the major players have moved very far in their efforts to go cloud native and there are a couple of reasons for this,” says Justin Day, the chief executive and co-founder at Cloud Gateway. “Firstly, change on such a large scale is difficult and this is made harder by the skills shortage in the industry. Without the right resources and skills, it becomes hard to innovate and drive change. Then you must look at what’s right for the bottom line. Large telecoms companies have invested vast amounts in purpose-built networking infrastructure. Therefore, it’s worth questioning whether it’s commercially advantageous for them to make significant cloud investments?”
Martin Halstead, the chief technologist for the Communications Technology Group at HPE, emphasises that the appetite for cloud native operations is strong but the reality lags. “Most CSPs have a strong desire to move to support cloud native workloads, however, from what we can observe they are typically not that far along the path beyond basic monolithic virtualisation of physical network functions on x86 based infrastructure,” he says. “This also pertains to CI/CD processes which require unified development and operations teams. The pipelines rarely extend to their major vendors and partners, thereby covering only a small part of the full lifecycle. This puts teams at a disadvantage as it prevents them from connecting and automating more of the total software development process and using for example monitoring tools. This is due to several factors, including lack of vendor support, fragmented operations, and lack of a compelling business case. At the same time, many CSPs have given up on cloud development internally and are looking to their vendors and the hyperscalers to bring them to the cloud.”
Lema points out that while there is a lot of innovation happening in the private network market on a small scale, the most relevant large-scale deployment is Rakuten. This CSP has been held up as an example of where the industry is heading but it provides possibly the only tangible example of large-scale cloud native commitment.
“A lot of innovation is happening outside of tier one CSPs, and also vendors are helping to drive that innovation,” she says. “There are many software suppliers on the orchestration layer that can help tier two and three CSPs transition to cloud native faster, following a long-term strategy that’s cost-effective.”
Day sees this putting pressure on tier one CSPs to accelerate their transformations. “Tier one CSPs are coming under increasing pressure to transform and keep pace with smaller providers, who tend to offer greater agility and can deliver services at the push of a button,” he says. “The landscape is moving faster than it ever has done before and customers want the reassurance that their service provider can quickly respond to rising demand and help them remain competitive. Those locked into incumbent monolithic networks often face a lack of flexibility and the need to keep investing in hardware. For customers, it’s difficult to keep up with the pace of change.”
The benefits are well understood and that is starting to feed through to larger transformational leaps and substantial projects to push through cloud-oriented strategies. “Moving to a cloud native approach is key to improving business resiliency, efficiency and innovation,” confirms Gabriel. “The technology transformation is important in enabling CSPs to achieve improved interoperability, flexibility and automation, but thinking about it from a technology level only is far too tactical, and in fact could see CSPs fall into the laps of the hyperscalers.”
For Halstead, the journey is underway but for CSPs to become cloud native will have to wait for the next wave of innovation. “The conversations around cloud native are no longer theoretical,” he says. “The vendor community has been actively developing cloud native network functions for some time. In addition, the hyperscalers are all targeting CSPs with offers that aim to accelerate their cloud native ambitions. There is now wide acceptance that both the core and radio access network (RAN) can operate at equivalent or in some cases, better performance than the physical network appliances they replace. Moving those typically cloud ready workloads to become fully cloud native will become the next wave of innovation.”
Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @VanillaPlus OR @jcvplus
