Top 10: Cloud Migration Strategies

The future of telco is fast-becoming all about the cloud, with cloud adoption continually growing across the digital business landscape. Organisations are more frequently turning to cloud migration to optimise their operations and enhance their scalability moving forward. 

In order to stay competitive and innovate successfully, telco operators are often advised now to have a cloud migration strategy in place. This is so they can improve their overall business operations in a variation of ways, including keeping costs down, speeding up time-to-market and improving customer satisfaction.

Mobile Magazine showcases the best and most popular cloud migration strategies for those within the industry to power ahead their progress.

10. Cloud-native development

Cloud-native development refers to the development of new applications and services using cloud-native technologies and principles. The strategy is designed to ensure optimal performance and full utilisation of cloud capabilities and involves building, deploying and managing applications in cloud computing environments.

These applications are designed to be scalable, flexible and resilient so that they can be adapted to suit customer demands quickly. Typically, they are built with microservices architectures and often delivered via a DevOps pipeline.

9. Phased migration approach

A phased migration approach is a cloud migration strategy that involves gradually moving data, applications and workloads to the cloud over time, instead of attempting to migrate everything simultaneously. This enables less critical workloads to be moved first so that testing can take place before mission-critical systems are migrated.

As a result, this strategy minimises both risk and disruption to essential services and can enable better control and cost management. It enables organisations to test and validate each phase and adjust their strategy accordingly so that they can optimise their workloads.

8. Security and Compliance Focus

In the telco sector, the security and compliance strategy involves securing vast networks of cell towers, data centres and customer devices while ensuring that telecommunications regulations are complied with. It includes implementing processes such as advanced encryption for calls and data transmissions, securing IoT devices and protecting customer data. 

The approach enhances customer privacy and reduces the risk of data breaches, but telcos are advised to be prepared when navigating complex international regulations, especially when operating across borders.

7. Network Function Virtualisation (NFV)

NFV is working to transform how telcos manage their network infrastructure. By virtualising functions like routing and firewalls, operators can reduce reliance on proprietary hardware. As a result, the strategy allows for more flexible network management and the faster deployment of disruptive services like 5G. 

Benefits associated with this strategy include a reduction in operational costs and improved network scalability. However, telcos can still face challenges in integrating NFV with legacy systems, as they will have to manage the complex nature of virtualised networks across wide geographic areas.

6. Data Migration and Management

A cloud-native strategy for data migration and management involves building, deploying and managing applications in a cloud computing environment. These applications are designed to be scalable and require frequently updating to meet changing customer demands. 

When it comes to telcos, this involves managing vast amounts of customer data, call records and network performance metrics. These organisations can ultimately leverage big data analytics to improve network planning and optimise spectrum usage. 

5. Edge Computing Integration

Edge computing is now often touted as a disruptive solution that can improve the way businesses collect and analyse data. It is able to process information near the source as opposed to in the cloud, reducing the need to transmit large volumes of data over networks.

In mobile networks, edge computing brings processing power closer to cell towers and end-users. This reduces latency for services like augmented reality and IoT applications. It also helps manage the large data volumes generated by 5G networks. 

4. Microservices Architecture

Microservices architecture is a software development approach that organises an application as a collection of independent services that communicate with each other. They are being adopted within the telco sector to make backend systems more agile, in addition to enabling faster updates to billing systems, customer portals and network management tools.

The strategy also enables telco operators to quickly deploy new services and respond quickly to market changes. This leads to improved scalability and new technologies to be integrated more successfully. 

3. Containerization

Containerization is a type of technology used in telecommunications to modernise network infrastructure and support next-generation technologies. With this strategy, operators can easily scale applications based on demand to better meet customer needs.

Likewise, containerization is used to deploy network functions and services more efficiently across different network environments. It helps the rollout of new services and operators to manage the diverse software ecosystem in modern networks, which can lead to services being deployed faster.

2. Hybrid Cloud Approach

Telcos are adopting hybrid cloud strategies in order to balance the need for data sovereignty and control, particularly as public clouds are upscaled. This approach allows operators to keep sensitive customer data and critical network functions on-premises, in addition to leveraging public clouds to handle traffic spikes. 

The benefits of such an approach include improved cost efficiency and greater flexibility in resource allocation for telcos. However, it can still be challenging to ensure integration is seamless between on-premises and cloud environments.

1. Assessment and Planning

Significant in the early stages of the cloud-native process, conducting a cloud assessment is a critical step for a business to assess its readiness for the cloud. Assessments evaluate a company’s readiness to migrate to, or further into, the cloud and identify potential challenges that could prevent a seamless cloud experience.

For the telco industry, this process involves a business evaluating its current network infrastructure and service offerings to plan ahead for disruptive technologies like 6G. The process helps operators align their technology investments with current market demands and regulatory requirements, enabling them to be more compliant and competitive.

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