Telco Cloud Providers: The Customer Perspective

By Al Brisard

Recently there have been a number of articles, blogs and presentations about CSPs taking their first steps into the telecom cloud computing space. With their legacy of managing large secure multi-tenant network infrastructures and advanced capabilities in service monitoring and metering, they seemingly have an edge over application providers who have so far dominated the space. The carrier-focused discussions usually overlook one critical element in a carrier’s move to offering cloud computing services – customers and what concerns and objections they have as they evaluate CSPs as possible alternatives for mission-critical solutions upon which their businesses will depend. These concerns and objections typically fall into three areas: performance, security and control.

Performance

There is no denying that cloud computing can result in efficient sharing of resources and costs among many users, leveraging virtual machines and applications. This is a good thing, because customers don’t have to focus on the machines, and costs are spread across a larger user base. As a result, carriers can offer more to customers at a lower price.

However, customers have the expectation that they will be losing performance in a cloud-computing environment. Most will be unwilling to gain cost improvements at the expense of the high performance user experience they currently enjoy when applications are run on their LAN and utilized by a known and finite set of users. The question customers are clearly going to ask is, “What do I have to give up to get cost improvements?" 

Performance is affected by many things such as network bandwidth, number of hops, processor utilization and packet overhead. As a result, two areas customers will most likely scrutinize with a user experience “stick" are network performance and application performance. Successful CSPs will focus on and address these customer concerns right upfront.

Security

For the most part, customers believe that if it’s outside their network, they are going to have security issues. Is there any way someone can get into their applications and see, manipulate or download their data? How often have you heard from stores or credit card companies that their systems are secure, only to find out that one of them was hacked and your previously private information is now in the hands of unauthorized hackers? 

How does the security model of cloud infrastructure integrate with that of the local network owned by the customer? Is single sign-on now an impossibility? How seamless can a customer blend the two environments without being forced to pick one and only one approach? 

Control

Control is the ability to do what I want, whenever I want. Moving to the cloud obviously changes the level of control by the customer, which is why minimizing that change will be key. Customers are used to doing maintenance, rebuilding VMs, load balancing, etc., when they want for various reasons. Will they have the same flexibility?   

For the less-sophisticated user, the stickiness aspect of the cloud will be the major objection CSPs could consider upfront. When customers invest in the cloud to a point of critical mass, they may at that time decide that it makes business sense to relocate that functionality back to their control in their data center. If the “stickiness" of the cloud is too intense and it is painful to change, customers will become extremely frustrated and will likely not go with a cloud alternative in the future. So making it easy for customers to come and go will be critical to the long-term success of cloud services.

Performance, security and control will be key customer objections that CSPs should address right up frontto ensure successful adoption and the long-term viability of their services. It is critical that providers take customer needs and concerns into consideration when providing new offerings in this still emerging new Internet-based computing market, and plan accordingly.

Al Brisard is vice president of marketing and business development at Vertek Corp., a leading provider of end-to-end business process outsourcing, business consulting and managed business assurance offerings that allow communication providers to reduce costs, improve customer experiences, grow revenue and ultimately improve profitability. Contact him at abrisard@vertek.com.