THE FUTURE OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS IS CLOUD-NATIVE ENGINEERING

Chhavi Chaturvedi

22 Mar 2022

Communications service providers are making the transition to cloud-native so they can improve services and expand their business. What are you waiting for?

Next-generation mobile networks are introducing new architectures and functionalities, significantly increasing network complexity. As a result, a growing number of communications service providers (CSPs) are concluding that traditional virtualization is insufficient for delivering 5G services.

The writing is on the wall. It is time to embrace cloud-native technologies to accelerate innovation and service. According to a recent Gartner report, cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives by 2025. That figure is more than double the less than 40% share of cloud-native platforms in 2021.

But the adoption of cloud-native solutions isn’t just about the technology. It is also about new markets and business opportunities to accelerate growth by providing global trade management, faster time to market, and greater agility, flexibility, scalability, and service availability.

The infrastructure transformation from legacy to cloud-native is perceived as crucial for creating a broader, more expansive ecosystem, where technology vendors, network operators, developers, and hyper-scale cloud providers work together to launch new business opportunities and generate new revenue streams.

Today’s typical CSP cloud faces many challenges, such as more effort required to manage large monolithic virtual network functions, too many manual tasks, complexity, migration challenges, security and privacy issues, latency, vendor lock-in, etc. All of these challenges can be mitigated by transitioning to cloud-native practices.

By adopting cloud-native engineering, CSPs can leverage cloud-native services such as containerization and orchestration, micro-services architecture, server-less architecture, DevOps CI/CD, observability, analysis, and many others. In addition, the transition can increase operational efficiency by designing and developing scalable, agile, cost-effective applications and running them in dynamic environments.

To implement efficient network functions and technologies with cloud-native solutions, CSPs must be open to the cloud approach and flexible, scalable, reusable, shared cloud-native platforms that are easy to maintain, upgrade, and scale.

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