Carriers Still Weighing How Much of Operations Belong on Public Clouds, Experts Say

Cloud providers need to do more to understand workloads and the telco market, said Mark Gilmour, chief technology officer at data network provider ConnectiviTree. Providers “like to think of ourselves as somewhat unique, or having our own challenges or our own opportunities,” he said. “We’re used to … providing high reliability, high availability, and not best-effort services,” he said.

ConnectiviTree remains “reluctant” to move some of its operations and network functions to a public cloud, Gilmour said. “I do see the benefit of using public cloud for us, where it makes sense for us,” he said. Security is a concern, but applications, services and other parts of the network may make sense on the public cloud, he said.

Public cloud providers have done a good job of “trying to understand the telco environment and the telco space much better” over the past few years, Gilmour said. “There’s still work to be done” and trust in cloud providers isn’t “ubiquitous,” he said.

People are excited about the possibilities of AI and using the capabilities of generative pretrained transformer (GPT) technology, said Shawn HakI, Microsoft vice president-5G strategy. Carriers want to bring GPT capabilities to their networks “to proactively build code that queries the network information” or “being able to use the copilot capabilities to build further automation,” he said.

Hakl said with a platform-based solution, carriers don’t design their network once and then are stuck with technology for years to come. Carriers can have “an evergreen platform,” and that’s something “that gets missed when we have the public cloud discussion,” he said. Microsoft can demonstrate the ability to cut network costs by as much as 36% by using a public rather than a private cloud, he said. Many of the savings come from “automation, simplification and standardization,” he said.

Providers face two questions -- can they move their workloads to the cloud, and if so, should they, HakI said. “It’s early days in case of reference use cases,” but mounting evidence shows the move can be made, he said. Carriers are asking how they can “fundamentally reduce” their cost structure and how they can “monetize the massive investments” they’re making in fiber deployments or buying and building out spectrum licenses for 5G, he said. Carriers will get only “incremental” progress until they develop “a new set of tools” and a “new way of doing things,” he said.

Providers have to address multi-level problems, said Appledore Research’s Rahul Atri. “We have to think about infrastructure coupled with network functions and their architecture, coupled with services,” he said. “Everyone is figuring out what the right cloud strategy is,” Atri said. That includes application providers, hyperscalers and carriers, he said.

Carriers are right to raise concerns about moving some operations to public cloud, Gilmour said: Carriers “know this space. We know how to provide resilient, robust network infrastructure.”

Companies have been using public clouds for more than a decade, said Ross Ortega, Microsoft vice president-product management. The efficiencies from public cloud “really come from automation and standardization,” he said. “How can we leverage all the tooling that we’ve already built for enterprises and employ that as part of the telco workloads?” he asked. Some operations probably need to remain on on-premise clouds because of “latency issues, compliance issues, things like that,” he said. The challenge is bringing public cloud technologies to private clouds, he said.