Cloud Computing for Telecommunication | Introduction to Cloud Computing

 Cloud Computing for Telecommunication

 

The telecommunication industry is one of the most rapidly growing industries in the upcoming years with the latest technologies such as 5g networks. Due to companies switching to work from home business models after the Covid pandemic, the telecommunication sector got an even bigger opportunity to market its services.  Providing a better user experience while dealing with the heavy traffic flow during peak hours has become a significant challenge for most telecom providers. The last couple of years depicted a notable trend in the telecommunication industry, switching to cloud infrastructures to gain multiple benefits.

 

Introduction to Cloud Computing

Cloud computing refers to any hosted services such as servers, databases, software, analytics, and other computing functions provided over the internet. Cloud computing replaces a local computer system or on-premises server requirement, bringing out multiple benefits for corporations in a wide range of aspects.

Cloud computing has two types of models. Deployment model and service model. Deployment models refer to the kind of cloud infrastructure an organization is planning to use. Private clouds are managed exclusively by an organization or a 3rd party. In contrast, public clouds are available over the internet for the public, handled by large entities such as Google, Microsoft, and AWS. Combining these technologies, hybrid infrastructures turn out to be the most emerging trend in the upcoming years.

The service model has three major offerings as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. IaaS would provide access to on-demand physical and virtual cloud-hosted services such as networking resources and storage. PaaS provides ready-to-use cloud-hosted platforms as a service for development, running, maintaining, and managing, and SaaS provides ready-to-use cloud-hosted software.

 

Limitations in Traditional methods

Indeed, cloud computing would provide a greater edge to the telecommunication companies than other competitors, enhancing the user experience, reducing operational expenses, flexibility, and the agility to compete with over-the-top companies. The pandemic made a significant impact on the digital lifestyle of people. In a very short period, internet service providers witnessed a rapid growth of people's inclination towards digital and online technologies. The biggest challenge most telecommunication companies faced was expanding their capacities to cope with the heavy demand and user traffic in real-time and adapt to emergencies.

At a certain point, most companies identified that the traditional business model they used to follow should be changed, and cloud technologies would bring them more benefits.

 

Benefits of Clouds for Telecom Operators

Provides scalability

Users are sensitive to the current events happening globally. If we consider a situation where an interesting cricket of football world cup final is happening, it would naturally gain worldwide attention. At this moment, a whole country would be connecting to online servers. This would bring in unpredictable exploding traffic, eventually other the local GGSN (Gateway GPRS Support Node) fully. These situations would highly impact the performance of the company. To deal with such cases, companies need to have local standby resources, and those resources would be a waste of money if they were only used for such specific instances.

In these instances, cloud technologies would provide you with a vast number of options. You could temporarily expand the capacity of the GGSN in real-time and even create new GGSNs at a new location with the help of NFV (Network Function Virtualization) architectures.

When it comes to traditional architectures, in upgrading the capacities, companies will face many difficulties such as delays in the supply chain, needing more workforce, taking longer than expected to deploy, and much more. But cloud bases would allow you to increase the capacities on the fly, and telecom providers can install the capacities parallel to traffic increment.

Adaptation, even in critical situations

Since telecom companies directly deal with technology, they must adapt to the latest technologies and direct customers. But with traditional hardware, companies would face major difficulties adapting to new technologies such as 5G and IoT devices, new functionalities and automation, and switching to new business models.

Cloud networks are getting updated rapidly with fast-growing technologies, and telecom companies would gain the ability to respond to new customer needs in no delay. Companies could create additional services on the fly, and deployment would be much faster than upgrading local infrastructures.

Servers could go down in disruptive situations like power outages, security breaches, and cyber-attacks. In such cases, it's essential to have robust data backup systems to ensure data security. Cloud service providers have strong standby infrastructures to ensure their clients' data are in safe hands.

 

Flexibility in Payment and Resources

Cooperate scale hardware systems need maintenance, quality checks and part replacements, and more above the initial investment. Keeping standby resources for emergencies would create a wastage of resources. Even smaller upgrades would be difficult decisions and a huge investment since they are not reversible. Further, switching between Circuit Switch Networks and Packet Core Networks with a traditional hardware system is impossible if the voice and data peak at two different situations. So the companies need to have separate systems to balance the situation.

But cloud systems provide you with the opportunity to scale up and down on the fly, and you would pay only for the amount you have purchased. This would allow the telecom companies to deal with traffic that explodes more effectively and upgrade the capacities according to the traffic without wasting resources while providing a better user experience. In addition, cloud-native developments provide the opportunity to switch virtual machines, virtual hardware, storage, and the resources in between packet core and circuit core networks.

 

Undoubtedly, cloud computing and networking have brought enormous opportunities for the Telecommunication industry to broaden the services, lower expenses, and provide a better customer experience.