Due largely to their well-deserved reputation for network reliability – commonly referred to as ‘carrier grade’ – CSPs can be forgiven for holding some preconceived notions about less-than-reliable public cloud infrastructure. Panelists at Digital Transformation World dispel some of the biggest myths.
Myth busting the public cloud
Due largely to their well-deserved reputation for network reliability – commonly referred to as ‘carrier grade’ – communications service providers (CSPs) can be forgiven for holding some preconceived notions about less-than-reliable public cloud infrastructure. In a Digital Leadership session at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World last month, experts from Optiva, Google Cloud and Ovum attempted to set the record straight on public cloud reliability by busting what they perceive as erroneous myths, and based on live polling during the morning-long session, they succeeded. Optiva launched its partnership with Google Cloud in February 2018 to stay ahead of the competition and help its CSP customers stay ahead of trends in digital transformation. One of the best ways was by reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) for CSPs. Optiva contends its cloud model will save one Tier 1 Canadian CSP up to 70% by moving revenue management and charging into Google Cloud. With that, Optiva busted one of the top five myths about public cloud: Every application space has been disrupted by cloud, and telecom is no exception. Optiva CEO Danielle Royston noted this, saying, “Public cloud is coming; it has come to every other industry.” The initial driver for migrating to public cloud over the next 1.5 to 2 years will be disaster recover, but Optiva and Google Cloud believe that is thinking too small. Ovum analyst Kris Szaniawski agreed, adding that the digital economy with be worth $4.6 trillion by 2025 and that the underlying architectural changes cannot be managed without some reliance on public cloud. These changes include IoT business models, revenue sharing, open APIs, DevOps, AI-driven automation, dynamic catalogs and flexible, cloud-based, multi-party service delivery.
Szaniawski said that 80% of CSPs list migrating OSS and BSS to the cloud as an important project in 2019. Sixty-seven percent said they have increased spending in these areas to accomplish the migration, and 70% expect to use cloud for supporting new services. Only 20% specified public cloud and that is the metric Optiva and Google Cloud believe needs to change.
There are legitimate concerns with public cloud, particularly with multi-national companies. Privacy and security rank highest. Regulatory requirements, for example, often insist that data must stay within country borders. Shay Assaraf, Chief Marketing Officer, Optiva, noted that data privacy requirements can be maintained by retaining ownership. He offered a three-step approach: Regarding security, Assaraf, cited a Gartner metric that shows public cloud workloads suffering at least 60% fewer security incidents than those in traditional data centers through 2020. He followed with several reasons why when it comes to the myth that on-premises solutions are inherently more secure than public cloud, the opposite is true. With the $40 billion Google has invested in its cloud business, the company has created an environment with:
Andy Kennedy, EMEA Customer Engineering Head at Google Cloud, said that as a benefit of Google’s own scale, it can develop purpose-built data center technologies that boost privacy, security, scalability and reliability. These include everything from purpose-built processing and memory chips to servers, storage, networks and the data centers themselves.
One example is Google’s Titan security chip, which is designed to protect computers from firmware-based rootkits and other malware-infecting firmware. Titan as a key element in Google's security and allows the company to boast that security for its Google Cloud Platform services goes to the hardware root-of-trust level. Another security feature of Google Cloud is the use of context-aware access. This is an approach to access management that provides granular controls for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) workloads and web applications based on a user’s identity and context of the request. Based on the BeyondCorp security model, context-aware access enables users to provide simpler access while enforcing granular controls, and provides a single cloud platform for both cloud and on-premises applications and infrastructure resources. For more on Google infrastructure security, see the company’s white paper. Google Cloud also employs independent verification and qualification for controlled access. This prevents maintenance or other personnel from accessing customer data, purposely or accidently, and records both the attempt and, if successful, the activity during the access. Kennedy said the effects of the extra security measures are counterintuitive to those worried about productivity:
“It is like the brakes on the car allowing you to go faster because they give you the confidence that you can stop in time. If we can give you the confidence that the brakes will be there in the cloud [with security] it will allow you to go faster.”
A quick poll conducted during the session revealed that given this new information, 64% of the audience found public cloud to be more secure than on-premises solutions, a double-digit improvement from the beginning of the session. The main differences between public and private cloud, according to Royston, are:
With confidence in the public cloud option as the best format for CSPs, Optiva is investing $100 million in re-architecting its products to be cloud native. The company’s strategy for adopting cloud-native development is to first adopt cloud-native architecture patterns, then leverage industry standards and improve scalability and operations. Royston said many suppliers claim to be cloud native today, but most have just shifted their existing apps to the cloud.