Mobile Operators have started on a journey to move their core network and IT systems to public cloud infrastructure. Until recently, Operators have held out against public cloud architectures, preferring to concentrate on their own private cloud environments. Increasingly, Operators have come to the realisation that they cannot reproduce in a private cloud environment the economies of scale made possible by large public cloud providers. Arguments for retaining private cloud environments for privacy reasons have become much less compelling as public cloud providers have built up their security processes and capabilities. With new investments now needed for 5G networks, Operators have accepted that their future infrastructure will need to be built on the public cloud to remain cost-effective.
Mobile Messaging services are ideally suited for public cloud deployments, and are therefore a perfect first step for Operators to take on this journey. Messaging Services are not highly sensitive to latency concerns, and do not require any specialised hardware platforms to run on. Messaging is also a service where demand and traffic volume fluctuates considerably over time, so the flexible scalability offered by public cloud providers would enable Operators to correlate their expenditure on cloud servers with actual service usage. Costs would therefore track revenues in a highly dynamic manner, allowing Operators to improve their margins on providing the service.
Public cloud providers also provide an array of fully managed instances of specific platforms such as Elastic, Cassandra, MySQL, etc. that are typically required as part of an overall Mobile Messaging solution. By using these managed instances, Operators do not have to build specific instances of these services for Messaging, considerably reducing their overall investments and operational overhead.
Openmind has long been an advocate of using public cloud architectures for messaging. Several years ago we moved all our development and test environments to the public cloud, and we have built extensive expertise in building cloud based platforms and optimising our software for the cloud. Some of our early-adopter customers have already deployed our platforms in the cloud, and we look forward to taking the rest of our customer base on this exciting journey in years to come!
