Implications and Future Prospects

Question:

What are the implications of cloud deployment of MVNO systems? How government laws can affect the deployment? What are the financial implica- tions?

Response:

Regulatory restrictions from government related to the customer data security and transferring data outside the country are the most discussed implications in the interview sessions. Data security and data access of cus- tomer sensitive data are the biggest challenges. In some countries, there is a law that authorities can listen to the communication lines. Moving data outside of country may not be possible as per some customer agreements. For example, police and fire-brigade numbers cannot be taken outside the country. If such important data need to be put in cloud then highest level of security and availability should be in place. However, bilateral contracts done between or among countries may help lowering the effect of such im- plications. One point of view related to these implications was regarding customer data that it’s possible to move CDRs among EU states with con- sent from the customers. It’s interesting to note that there were no major implications faced by Qvantel while moving MVNO/MNO BSS systems to the cloud.

There is also a challenge that the customer data should be retained in BSS systems for specified time frame and it should also be possible to remove data which can be problematic with the cloud implementation. It’s very dangerous for operators if customer data is stolen or lost. For example, Sony PlayStation PS3 customer credit card data were stolen. Such situations may put operators in difficult position and operators could lose the significant customer base and business. Operators must have access to customer data all the time. Union or government regulations are general implications. Security, privacy and network could be technical implications. Security while sharing processing and storage spaces with other companies is a big concern.

There are problems with ability to do customization, systems integration and configuration challenges. MVNOs may want to change BSS functions at times and cloud makes it difficult. Time to respond to new legislation changes could have significant delays. There are also regulations from tele-

com authority related to data, SLAs and customer services which should be taken care of while moving MVNO systems to the cloud. On the operational perspective, the issue is to maintain critical tickets in the region as to solve customer issues within the region which may be difficult if data is not avail- able with operators all the time. Interaction transaction logging is also a challenge especially in case of B2B customers if systems are on cloud.

Latency and throughput problems may arise if services are migrated or outsourced to other country. Country specific requirements or factors such as call loop timings, data protection regulations, network latency etc may cre- ate implications. Labor laws are also of concern as operators may reduce the workforce from IT admin department to gain cost-benefits from cloud imple- mentation. Generally 20-30 human resources reside in IT admin departments in medium scale MVNOs and implementation of cloud gives possibility to re- duce IT admin resources significantly. No financial implications as such.

Question:

What do you think of the future of MVNO and Telecom Software industry also considering importance of cloud? What vision do you look for?

Response:

Cloud in Telco IT systems is already taking place. However, Telco clouds with high availability and closing the gaps of carrier-grade SLAs are not yet available. OSS on cloud is not feasible as of now due to high OSS SLAs, network bandwidth problems, and cloud issues of availability and SLA situa- tions. However, Comptel is planning implementation of several components of OSS on the cloud. So it’s clear that for Telco, there is still long way to go to deal with cloud fully. There are inherent problems in network architecture and so MSS and HLR on cloud are not feasible.

Moving existing systems to the cloud is more difficult than starting the operations from scratch on cloud. Cloud is important where capacity in net- work or processing might not be enough. Operators ted to get market share and cloud will help with its economy of scale attributes. There will be fu- ture for the cloud when it’s technically feasible, economically cost-beneficial. However, cloud is fragile as lot of network related and trust issues to have data outside company or country or region.

Future will be more like utility based telecom traffic and implementation of flat rate business models. Flat rate data plans are already in place and getting popular. There will be no need of complex billing systems for flat rate pricings and such scenario will work in favor of cloud implementation of telecom systems. Clouds will be very important in the future as they are also based on utility computing architecture. Also Cloud will be a natural choice for MVNO in fierce competition of price and service differentiation. If integration and data security is proper then Telco will tend to use cloud

services and gain benefits of cloud making cloud - a good, smart and rea- sonable hype. BSS and CRM will be easy to deploy on cloud however OSS and Prepaid won’t be easy to move to the cloud. In case of MNOs, lot of MNOs have old in-house legacy IT systems and it’s difficult and expensive to move or migrate those systems to the cloud. TeliaSonera is using salesforce in Denmark and Norway and they are also evaluating possibility to expand it more. However, TeliaSonera is not aggressive on cloud front.