Labels: Accelerating , Cloud , innovation , Services

Accelerating SP innovation with Cloud Services

Many network service providers (NSPs) see the in the Cloud a way to reduce the long and expensive innovation cycles.  But when we talk about Cloud, it’s inevitable to compare the traditional telco world with the Over-the-top universe. Is the telecommunication operator well positioned to compete in the global cloud marketplace?

 

However, NSPs have competitive advantages that can help them to provide differentiated Cloud services if they can articulate a compelling value proposition around them.

OTT Cloud providers are very agile in creating new services due to its cumulated experience. Also due to its internal efficiencies developed, they can provide very cost effective services. Being said that, we can also find some limitations they are facing:

Availability: OTTs, in general, expect the network will always be there. The SLAs they offer, ignore the network communications piece.Security appears consistently in every survey as a key barrier for organization to migrate to the cloud.Trust: End users and enterprises are interested to know which country hosts their data, and which company custodies it. The recent NSA case filtered by Snowden increased concerns. 

Analyzing those issues, we can see how Network Service Providers are in a privileged position to successfully offer Cloud services:

Availability: NSPs can offer end-to-end SLAs from the VM all the way to the end user device, being fixed or mobile.Security: Many enterprises already get managed security services from NSPs, so securing the Cloud would be an extension of them.Trust: NSP can keep the data local in the country or region of choice for the end-user. Swisscom recently created the Swiss Cloud concept, linking it with the long term tradition of the secrecy in the banking sector in Switzerland.

Being well positioned, not necessarily translates in being there… NSPs still has a long journey to evolve towards a model that brings the flexibility and elasticity in their end-to-end operations, and not just inside their data centers.

In the following presentation I explain how NSPs can embrace Cloud, how the network can evolve towards a dynamic architecture and where some of the business opportunities are for enterprise cloud services.

                      Presentation: David Noguer Bau – Cloud Based Services

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