“CSPs are still protective, but seeking more choices in how they can implement their applications in the cloud, wanting the flexibility to migrate applications and data among private and public clouds at will,” added Lievano.

As a result, hybrid cloud may ultimately become the platform of choice for telcos wanting to participate in tomorrow’s multicloud environments, in which all clouds will have to interoperate. Microsoft Azure is banking on the belief that software-defined cloud approaches will prevail, as they enable digital ecosystem platforms to either live in one datacenter or to span multiple datacenters.

“This will foster rapid assembly of cloud resources into tenant overlays and service chains,” said Eric Troup, CTO, worldwide media and telecommunications. He believes that within their own environments, and through the cloud offerings they open up to enterprise customers, CSPs should continue to advocate for the choice to build new applications directly in their own private environments or in virtual data centers. They should work with their vendors and partners to create seamless connections between virtual environments and the dedicated environments in which legacy applications sit. “Then, they can achieve the flexibility and agility needed to test services before going into production,” he added.

Lievano proceeded to outline key characteristics CSPs should seek in their evolution toward hybrid cloud:

Expansive Ecosystem

In terms of scalability and interoperability, there must be support from leading ISVs with specific vertical expertise. As cloud capabilities are extended to leading telecom vendors, there is a transformation of how they view their products and how their CSPs customers do as well. Microsoft Azure partners WeDo and Apptus explained how their views are evolving with cloud: 

“We are involved in a very new approach, as traditionally, telecom fraud management software vendors didn’t provide CSPs the full access to their systems without a certain amount of investment. We have come to see the importance of allowing customers that ‘aha’ moment, where they realize they can have an always-updated cloud FMS," said Rui Paiva, CEO of WeDo Technologies. "We have our fraud management product up and running in a cloud environment, and now CSPs can test it before buying it," said Paiva, explaining that by joining forces with Microsoft Azure, WeDo has been able to build an elastic architecture that onboards a new customer in less than two minutes. It also auto scales through the use of Large-Scale Container Orchestration with Kubernetes.

Kevin White, vice president of partner alliances at Apttus agrees that cloud is helping vendors achieve their customers' goals. “The telco industry is depending on innovation in the cloud and CRM more than ever before.