Like businesses in every sector, many telecom service providers have already moved their IT infrastructure delivery and maintained to the cloud. Cloudification is an increasingly essential way for any company to cut IT operations costs while gaining the flexibility and agility needed to survive and thrive in today’s fast-changing world.
But how do telecommunication services come in and integrate with cloud services? This is an interesting question as just a few years ago, the conventional thought was that cloud computing was strictly for specialized, purpose-built appliances.
The emergence of network function virtualization (NFV) first opened the door as a core part of tomorrows telecoms network appliance. The first milestone of this journey was the virtualization of network functions. This process consists of replacing traditional network appliances with highly efficient virtualized functions delivered, using industry-standard IT equipment. Through virtualization, telcos can use standardized server hardware for multiple purposes, instead of relying on bespoke appliances.
In more recent years, two trends have advanced the cloudification of telecommunication networks first, in addition to pure virtualization, telcos have started to employ cloud business and cloud management practices such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for their network functions cloudification, a game changer for next generation telecommunication networks.
