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Sunshine on a Cloudy Day: How Telcos Can Bridge the Gap Between Cloud and Network

Sunshine on a Cloudy Day: How Telcos Can Bridge the Gap Between Cloud and Network Image Credit: Skorzewiak/BigStockPhoto.com

Wasn’t so long ago that clouds were bad news. A shadow on a summer day. Now, of course, clouds are everywhere, and they are at the heart of a world that is chock-full of interaction and innovation. Add mass 5G uptake to the bevy of cloud-native apps hitting today’s networks, and it is clear that telecom operators are now dealing with a new set of challenges. One that requires they bridge the gap between the dynamicity of these cloud-native applications and their current network infrastructure.

So, what’s a telecom operator to do? Let’s explore the history first.

Cloud-native revolution

Cloud-hosted applications have always relied on the network, but they have had an uneasy relationship with it. In the beginning, the volume and performance requirements of these applications meant they could flit across the network practically unnoticed. That evolutionary stage is long gone. The cloud is now the primary way to deliver applications, and a cloud-native architecture has emerged as the foundation to deliver those apps. Now though that architecture is putting a strain on the telecom network, compromising its primary function: connecting users to their apps.

Return on investment

5G and cloud-native architectures bring to market a new generation of enterprise and consumer services.

From a consumer’s perspective think cloud gaming  where consumers can play AAA games on any device  shopping and gaming experiences enriched with augmented and virtual reality, and even more personalized social media and video experiences.

From an enterprise perspective, imagine robotic forklifts, augmented reality easing industrial maintenance activities, or drones carrying out tasks more accurately and safely.

These new services allow cloud and telecom operators to elevate themselves from commodity “best effort” bandwidth providers to advanced “connectivity” providers, catapulting them into the value chain of these services, creating net new revenue, and increasing the return on their 5G investment.

However, to meet these lofty aspirations, telecom operators need to build a 5G-ready transformed network fabric in the right manner.

Modern network challenges

What are the challenges operators face with their current network design, if they are to rise to this new opportunity? There are a few.

Often networks are rigid and have limited visibility. Networks need to be built to be open, extensible and consumable, allowing operators to have full access and control of network data, while also being able to customize the network and its tooling as needed to meet their individual business needs.

Networks need to be horizontally integrated across the ecosystem they operate within. This allows operators to thrive in any environment while allowing them to leverage insight from any system with ease.

Operational productivity must increase, and increase dramatically. Therefore, telecom operators need to embrace a NetOps (DevOps applied to networking) network operational model if the network is going to thrive in this era.  

Time for a solution

For the on-demand cloud model to thrive, networks need to become a reliable, consumable resource, not unlike compute and storage. Networks need to be at one with the applications they serve. They should be agile, scalable, on-demand, and tunable to the precise requirements of the cloud application or workload, which means that automation of operational practices is required but knowledge of the application is crucial.

Over time, we see a high degree of integration between the network and the cloud with the two becoming a distributed fabric of storage, processing and network functions that is highly fluid and adaptable to the requirements of digital applications. Understanding this big picture, we have been integrating many of the technologies and tools that operators will need to seize this opportunity. We call it Adaptive Cloud Networking, a solution that equips telecom operators with the tools to thrive in a world gone cloud native.

A model-driven network operating system (NOS) leverages an open Linux-based foundation to provide openness and extensibility. The NOS also makes it easy for northbound systems to access network data directly or through streaming telemetry. This is vital to making networks highly consumable.

Taming network complexity is requisite as cloud-based applications and services – which are dynamic by nature – make it much more difficult to predict what connectivity and SLAs will be needed. As such, a cloud-native network and automation platform provides integration into the major cloud management platforms. This allows the network to move “up the stack” so it is in lockstep with the application layer, with enough agility to meet the needs of the cloud applications it serves.

On the operations side, this platform offers easy-to-use and built-in NetOps-based automation tools. These provide more abstract means of operating the network and simplify consumption of large sets of telemetry data, enabling a more proactive approach to network operation.

Nokia Adaptive Cloud Networking focuses on providing these capabilities across three aspects of the telecom network. The first of these is the traditional large data center fabric. The second is the rapidly emerging edge cloud of the network. The third aspect is seamless interconnectivity, providing the ability to automate the connectivity of application traffic between different data center or cloud edge locations across the wide area network while maintaining SLAs.

The way forward

Clouds are everywhere, and the future is bright for operators who can bridge the gap between the dynamicity at the applications layer and the network. The Nokia solution is designed to tame the growth in network complexity that the cloud brings, while unleashing the scale, performance and operational efficiencies needed to prosper in this next stage of the fast-evolving cloud-native market.

Interested in learning more about how to revolutionize your operations from edge to cloud? Watch this video and visit our Adaptive Cloud Networking webpage.

Author

At Nokia, Daniel Derksen is responsible for Product Line Management of Data Center & SD-WAN solutions for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa regions. Cloud, automation and building consumable infrastructures are some of his key interests. Daniel has over 20 years of experience in the IP industry covering SDN, Telco-Cloud, IP/MPLS routing, aggregation/backhaul, and business and residential services.

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