IDC believes that the telco cloud will develop in parallel with cloud hyperscalers, operations support systems or business support systems vendors, application providers, system integrators, open source groups, and industry bodies.
These are among the findings from IDC Asia/Pacific’s Market Analysis Perspective: Elevating the Role of Telcos in a Multicloud Ecosystem, 2020 report, which examines how telco public cloud adoption (telcos partnering with hyperscalers to move enterprise workloads to cloud) can be bridged to enterprise needs as communications service providers construct their next-gen network infrastructure.
IDC defines the multi-cloud telco environment as an external digital lever for telcos to provide enterprises with required key performance indicators (latency, bandwidth, jitter) via a public cloud or cloudified internal systems – to enable scalability, faster go to market, and improved customer experience.
The provision of this multi-cloud ecosystem with end-to-end orchestration, seamless life-cycle services, and secured and automated billing systems is the need of the hour for any enterprise.
In the long term, this positions telcos to lay the foundation to become ubiquitous cloud network providers and provide an exchange of cloud interconnect services on their platform.
Based on IDC’s research, the following are key highlights of the multi-cloud telco network:
* The entire stack of infrastructure, and applications (including middleware) needs to be cloud-enabled and cloud provisioned for enterprises to reap the true benefits of scalability and resiliency. The telco public cloud market is poised to reach $2,6-billion by 2024, with storage, server, and CRM applications forming the bulk of that spend. Telcos have an opportunity to provide enterprises the required KPIs with cloud enabled solutions.
* The four ways telos can adopt a multi-cloud journey are via cloud infrastructure (IaaS), cloud orchestration, cloud life-cycle services, and cloud interconnect solutions.
* For an effective top down and vice-versa implementation, the current network functions virtualised infrastructure (NFVi) resources need to morph into a cloud-based network functions – managed by a Kubernetes cluster – which can then prevent vendor lock-in to provide flexibility to enterprises.
* The competition for telcos is predominantly from global cloud hyperscalers, managed service providers, and system integrators.
* In some cases, telcos will have to depend on their data centre or IaaS offerings. Furthermore, IDC data shows there is a need to evolve data centres with fluidic cloud infrastructure with multi-cloud and hybrid cloud capabilities. As telcos rely on the edge located typically near mobile cell sites and/or regional/local data centres, the heterogenous cloud network of far edge, near edge, and city data centres will be crucial.