Operators facing dwindling revenue from wireline subscribers, fierce tariff wars and exploding mobile data traffic are continually being pressured to do more for less. Spending on infrastructure is increasing as they look to provide better service within slender budgets.
In these tough times telcos have to devise new and innovative strategies and make judicious technology choices. Two promising technologies, cloud computing and analytics, are shaping up as among the best choices to make.
Cloud architecture does away with the worry of planning the computing resources needed, the real estate, the costs of the acquiring them and thoughts of its obsolescence. It allows the CSPs to purchase processing power, platforms and databases almost as a utility like electricity or water.
Cloud consumers only pay for what they use. The magic of this promising technology is the elasticity that the cloud provides - it expands to accommodate increasing demands and contracts when the demand drops.
The cloud architectures of Amazon, Google and Microsoft – currently the three biggest cloud providers - vary widely in their capabilities and features. These strengths and weaknesses should be taken into account while planning a cloud system. Each is best suited for only a certain class of applications unique to each individual cloud provider.
On one end of the spectrum Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) provides a virtual machine and a wealth of associated tools for storage and notifications. But the trade-off for increased flexibility is that users must take responsibility for designing resiliency into their systems.