This spring I was invited to be a speaker at the next Risk and Assurance Group (RAG) Conference. It was to be held in Denver, CO at Century Link (now Lumen). Alas , the COVID-19 pandemic scuttled those plans so until we can meet-up again live, it was decided to move the conference online and RAG Americas Online virtual conference was launched. September 16, 2020 was Day 2.
The highlight of Day 2 was the panel discussion on “Moving Telcos to the Public Cloud”. The panelists were Clodagh Durkan an expert in the fields of security governance, data protection, cryptography and perimeter threat detection ; Patrick Donegan the founder and principal analyst of Hardenstance, a research business focused on telecom and IT security ; and Danielle Royston former CEO of Optiva and Evangelist for the Cloud.
Most industries have already made the move to the cloud, after dipping their toes in it they have gone all in with their whole businesses. Even former skeptics and holdouts such as JP Morgan Chase have become cloud advocates .
The premise was that telcos need to move their software and datasets from their own data centres to the public cloud; specifically the hyperscalers ; Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s Google Cloud. The immediate benefits are dramatically reduced costs, increased flexibility and security and then abundant opportunities for growth and improvement by using the tools and software that the clouds provide. The clouds are not commodities nor necessarily competitors , they offer the opportunity for telcos to evolve and become better.
There were many questions from the audience and objections were raised on multiple fronts. The hyperscalers are all American companies (and we didnt include Alibaba from China and others on the list). It was noted that the public cloud companies have locations in almost every country and can contractually tailor the solutions to satisfy stringent government data localization requirements.
What about security ? The point was made that the hyperscalers are orders of magnitude more vigilant about security than even the largest telco would be. They have the staff, budget and experience to do it better. The telco can hand off that headache and hold the cloud companies feet to the fire via the contractual obligations.
Some large telcos have started to move towards the cloud. Examples such as Vodafone , Deutsche Telekom and Verizon were touted with specific projects. It may take time for telcos to fully relinquish their perceived investments in control, the desire to “hug their own servers”.
This is an area I will be watching with eager anticipation. I know if I was younger and just starting out again I would defiantly build AurorA 2.0 as a native cloud company and take advantage of the software tools such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning that a company AurorA’s size wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise. The cloud really tips the scales to level the playing field for smaller entrepreneurial companies to be able to compete with even global giants.
If you didn’t get a chance to watch the live stream, the videos of the presentations will be available to view at the RAG website;
https://riskandassurancegroup.org/
I highly recommend searching out this panel discussion to view and digest for anyone in telecom, anywhere in the world.
