Telecoms companies were famously beaten to the cloud computing punch by smarter, nimbler rivals. By the time they realized what was happening, the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft had built up an unassailable advantage. Telcos were relegated to a supporting role, and have been condemned ever since to carry the OTT services built on these cheap elastic clouds - services that have commoditized networks and shrunk margins. In life it’s rare that you get second chances. But with the advent of 5G and edge computing, telcos might have exactly that.
To grasp it this time they will need to be bold and collaborative. They must learn to trust one another, and have the security and performance management capabilities they need to drive assurance in a new world of high-speed, distributed computing.
#1: The world gone digital
The past few years have been one of unstoppable growth: of devices, users and data. The good news for telcos is, it’s only just got started. The latest forecast from IDC, more modest than many others, claims that by 2025 there will be nearly 42 billion connected devices in the world, generating as much as 79.4 zettabytes of data. To clarify, a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes.
This is the world gone digital, and it’s heading in one direction: a new era of 5G and edge computing. This will finally deliver on the vast promise of the Internet of Things, (IoT) by ensuring that critical data is processed at the edge of the network for extremely low latency, high bandwidth and high availability. According to the FCC, the 5G edge “offers a future with near real-time, back-and-forth connections” that “make it feel like every device is a supercomputer.”
High performance applications including augmented and virtual reality, video streaming, autonomous vehicles, Industry 4.0, and gaming have all been touted as perfect use cases for this new computing paradigm. But in reality, the implications aren’t even clear to those involved at the heart of this great technology project. They may only start to come into focus years after the first 5G edge computing services start to come online.
Yet these are coming faster than you may think. Some 46 operators in 24 markets had launched commercially available 5G networks by the end of January 2020, and 5G is predicted to account for 1.2 billion connections by 2025, according to the GSMA.
By Richard Piasentin,
Chief Marketing and
Chief Strategy Officer,
Accedian
#2: Complexity is everywhere
The exciting news for global telcos is that everything is still up for grabs. The traditional cloud players may have built giant, monolithic data centers to support their customers, but this is not the world of edge computing. Here, data must be processed close to the device, right at the edge of the network - giving telcos a built-in advantage. This is a jigsaw puzzle comprising multiple providers and elements - network, compute power, content and applications. Who does what is still to be decided. This is a huge opportunity.
However, what we do know already is that in a new paradigm of near real-time back-and-forth connections, network and application performance will be absolutely critical. Gaining granular, continuous and accurate visibility into that performance will become even more important for service providers than it currently is. Yet it will also be even more challenging to do so, thanks to the sheer complexity of these new environments and the need for real-time insight from the edge all the way to the core cloud and datacenter. These visibility challenges have been amplified further by the increasing popularity of microservices and containers in cloud architectures.
This complexity may also create opportunities for cybercriminals and nation states if cybersecurity is not baked into networks from the very start. For example, virtualization-based network slicing effectively increases the attack surface that providers need to protect. And the dynamic nature of such services requires fast-adapting controls across the entire customer/provider ecosystem.
#3: What happens next?
So how do communications service providers (CSPs) seize the moment to place themselves at the center of this new world? Trust will be key. That means, deploying flexible, adaptive, end-to-end security-based tools that generate maximum visibility across device, network and cloud, and machine learning to identify suspicious behavior. That same comprehensive visibility will be needed to support application and network performance management from the edge to the core, at a low TCO. With critical infrastructure and services running on 5G edge, nothing less will be enough to assure customers.
Trust must also be extended to other edge computing stakeholders. Software developers and device makers will expect the same interfaces, capabilities and standards from CSPs, no matter where in the world they’re working, which provider they’re working with and what kind of deployment they’re working on. That’s the kind of standardization that has helped America’s cloud providers to capture much of global market. It will require CSPs to work together on harmonizing their technologies and push fears of commoditization to the back of their minds.
Some CSPs, like Verizon and AT&T, have already made partnership announcements on edge computing with incumbent cloud giants. Time will tell whether this was a smart move. Whatever happens with these deals, the telco community can dream bigger. But first it will need to evolve.
