The cloud has made a massive impact on the telecom industry by reducing operational and administrative costs to maintain unified communication and collaboration. A recent IDC Asia/Pacific study noted that the “telco public cloud market is poised to reach US$2.6 billion by 2024, with storage, server, and CRM applications forming the bulk of that spend.” To avoid common pitfalls and ensure a smooth migration from legacy telecom to a cloud-based communication solution, businesses need to develop and follow a well-planned strategy while also anticipating changes in the industry.
For most businesses, a three-pronged approach involves looking at your people, processes and technology to develop a distinctive cloud roadmap tailored to your business’ unique and specific needs:
Focus on: people
One of the first and most obvious things cloud migration does for your business, where your people are concerned, is free up your workforce. With fewer servers and/or data centers to run, it allows your talent to focus on innovating your core business. Instead of using resources to maintain systems, you enable teams to perform more valuable and rewarding work that not only delivers business results but also improves morale across the organization.
Making a move to a public cloud provider such as AWS, GCP, or Azure can also help businesses secure their talent. The reality is, if you're not looking at the cloud now, members of your IT team might leave because they want and need to keep their skills as honed and relevant as possible. It makes intuitive sense - nobody wants to work for an organization that is solely based on antiquated systems with no sight of modernization on the horizon.
A cloud roadmap allows your IT team to shift their focus back to your business. How much time does your IT team spend running hardware? And is it really driving new business? What if you could turn that on its head so the team could focus on something new that will help crush the competition? It’s certainly more attractive to both business leaders and those in the trenches to work on innovative projects rather than maintaining aging systems.
Focus on: processes
If you take the current IT processes you have - testing, support, and anything else you can think of - and migrate them as-is to the cloud, it probably won't work the way you envision because it's a different paradigm. Teams that are new to the cloud should evaluate their processes to determine which are (or are not) “cloud ready.” In fact, the real value of the cloud becomes apparent once you've moved your core data. When it's in the cloud, you can start consuming cloud-based tools that allow you to unlock the real value of your data.
People have been talking about data monetization for years, but it's hard to achieve. And trying to monetize data through existing internally-deployed IT processes probably won't work. It requires you to buy new hardware, get new data warehouse software, hire additional talent - it all becomes too costly and likely won’t give you a strong return on your investment.
However, once your data is in the cloud, you immediately have options. You can spin up something for Microsoft Azure and try it for a few days and spend just a few thousand dollars - a drop in the bucket compared to a full IT infrastructure overhaul. The word "agile" has become somewhat of a business cliché, but it applies here. Once your data is in the cloud, consuming it is so much easier, allowing you to try quick iterations of tools and solutions to discover the true value of your data.
The evolution of consumer demands has accelerated telecom companies’ adoption of multi-cloud capabilities to handle a greater share of customers, CRMs, infrastructure products, resource planning and support systems. The telecom industry is governed by stiff competition among different carriers that struggle to meet ever-increasing demands for various applications and services, with major APAC telco players having invested in cloud capabilities and IoT ecosystems to provide additional services to their markets. Modernizing these services can help telecom providers reposition themselves in the value chain by building capability for greater offerings to their IT teams and consumers.
Focus on: technology
An overlooked reality is that very few - if any - businesses have migrated to 100 percent cloud-based infrastructures. It's surprising how many businesses still have a hosting provider, run internally-deployed systems, or some combination of both. Conversely, it’s even more surprising how few organizations are completely without data centers.
Yet Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) SaaS cloud sticker shock is a growing concern, and it’s real. If you're running an internally-deployed Oracle or SAP ERP, for example, moving to a SaaS-based ERP could result in roughly three times of your existing costs. And if you are already in the cloud on a limited basis and have freed up resources using third-party support, making a full move to SaaS-based ERP might cost you four to five times of your current costs.
On the flip side, it also rarely makes sense to invest in the most current ERP on the market (and the associated support costs that come with it). Yes, this does mean that you will get all of the current updates as soon as they’re available, but will that next incremental change in your HR or supply chain system suddenly make you crush the competition? The answer is almost always “no.”
With the emergence of 5G and accelerated digital transformation, higher expectations from consumers offer the telecom industry a unique opportunity to provide next-generation network products and services. With global telecom cloud market size forecasted to balloon from US$19.8bil to US$52.3 bil by 2026, telco players are seizing the opportunity to expand their capabilities, driving more agility, collaboration and competition in the market.
Ultimately, telecom companies must think of their cloud-based business roadmap as an equation. There is a certain cost in place for your current people, processes, and tech hardware, and you also need to factor in upcoming events such as an overdue refresh of the data center to address old hardware or a lease that needs to be renewed. You should also consider the opportunity costs around security and disaster recovery. Finally, what does your CFO think about the cloud? They might say, “My buddy went to the cloud and got sticker shock, so I’m hesitant.” So you need to also get a sense of what their view of the cost is as well.
More telco players are beginning to conclude that the cloud is inevitable. What a cloud rollout looks like for your business will likely differ from that of other organizations, but at the end of the day, the key question is this: Would you rather spend time supporting your existing applications and/or implementing new backup software in order, or do you want to build in a level of flexibility that will help you grow and, ultimately, future-proof your business?
