If it’s not 80% cheaper, is it really cloud?

There’s a simple test to use to be sure what you’re buying is truly cloud native: the price.

Score points with the public cloud

$100B

With the largest global infrastructure footprint of 200 fully featured services and $100B invested, telcos should leverage AWS CapEx for their gain.

30

With AWS’s presence in 30 regions, 90+ availability zones, and announced plans for 15 more zones and 5 more regions, there’s bound to be a region near you (or coming soon).

100

AWS has 100 security certifications. Its continued focus on security and reliability ensures that your data is safe, encrypted, and adhering to the stringent security requirements in the world.

80%

Public cloud components bring a massive cost reduction, as much as 80% lower TCO compared to private-cloud or on-prem deployments.

MYTH BUSTING

Common public cloud myths

Don’t let outdated objections hinder the growth of your telco. Read on to debunk some of the common public cloud myths.

Data regulations

The public cloud can be used in many countries and regions, even with complex data regulation requirements. To address these issues, organizations can use tools and services offered by public cloud providers, such as encryption and data masking. For more information, read our free whitepaper.

Read the whitepaper

Security concerns

Despite perception that it is less secure, public cloud actually experiences fewer security breaches compared to on-premises data centers. Research from Gartner (Cloud Strategy Leadership, 2020) shows public cloud infrastructure-as-a service (IaaS) workloads suffers at least 60% fewer security incidents than those in traditional data centers.

Security at AWS

Unpredictable costs

Pay for what you use may seem like an unpredictable cost in the beginning but it’s transparent and scalable with no forced large upfront payments or long-term contracts. The cost only increases as the company scales. Win-win, no?

Check out our pricing

Vendor-lock in

If vendor lock-in with public cloud worries you – you’re already locked into the thousands of tiny decisions made by your IT team. Using the public cloud catapults you into a world of opportunities like increased ARPU and massive cost savings. Want to know more? Read our CEO’s opinion on it here.

Why should telcos use the public cloud?

Infrastructure

Investment

Stop buying hardware, forever. Step off the hardware refresh treadmill and slash your CapEx spend dramatically. You can take advantage of the massive investments already made by the public cloud giants. Just look at the CapEx investments made by AWS, with over 30 regions (and growing), and $800 million invested per availability zone, and nearly $3B per data centre, what’s not to love? When you move to the public cloud, you’ll never need to buy hardware or staff your operations team again.

Data Centers

At the end of 2021, there were 728 hyperscale data centers in operation globally. Amazon spends more per quarter in CapEx than IBM Cloud has in the last DECADE. Be like DISH and capitalize on the colossal CapEx investments made by the hyperscalers (nearly $100B in 2020 alone!).

Reliability & Disaster Recovery

With the public cloud as your backbone, you can be confident that your data is backed-up across multiple regions, with 24×7 availability.

CSPs work hard to put together a disaster recovery plan, but most are never used (read this funny take on disaster recovery by our pal, Corey Quinn). The hyperscalers have built in countless layers of business continuity protection. If the software is truly built for the public cloud, it inherits all this glorious reliability!

Hardware

Custom Hardware

Do you build custom hardware chips? Amazon does. Apparently Intel chips weren’t good enough, so Amazon built ARM-based Graviton2 chips. Amazon states that these chips offer a 40% price to performance improvement per dollar compared to AMD and Intel. Read more about this in AnandTech’s ”x86 Massacre” article. And that was Graviton2. They’re on Graviton3 now which is even faster than its predecessor.

Storage

Your business has a huge amount of data – and it’s growing, but it’s probably siloed – in outdated on-premise storage. You need to be able to store this goldmine of network data securely and access it easily on a platform that’s infinitely scalable. And that’s why you need public cloud-based storage.

Did you know that there are different types of storage? Fast access storage. Slow access storage. (I mean, they call it Glacier for a reason) And everything in between. Move the stuff you don’t need quickly to cold storage for a lower price than the stuff you need quickly.

Can your data center do that? Dropbox’s couldn’t. Read how they moved their metadata to AWS to save money on storage access patterns from their on-premise, proprietary data center and saved a bundle.

Capacity Planning

It’s a losing battle today when it comes to scaling and capacity planning versus your five-year CapEx depreciation cycle. When you make a five-year decision today to “size up” your data center, your decision becomes obsolete the day you make it when you can move workloads to better hardware with a few keystrokes (and no CapEx!) with the public cloud.

Not with Totogi! When we were planning for MWC21, we wanted to prove we could support every subscriber on the planet on one platform. We called AWS to expand our limits and in a snap – 1B users were provisioned in just a matter of days!

Data Management

Security

Worried your data isn’t secure in the public cloud? Google Cloud’s data centers have six layers of security and the most robust multi-system security protocol available. The company has a stout physical security plan – from secret locations to armed guards, fences, multi-layer biometrics, and more. Watch this video with Stephanie Wong of Google who did a tour of a Google Data Center and see how difficult it is to get in. How does this compare to your current protocol?

Similarly, AWS also follows all security, confidentiality, and compliance requirements through Amazon GuardDuty or their AWS Nitro System. Their Nitro System does not allow any system or person to log in to EC2 servers, read the memory of EC2 instances, or access any data stored on instance storage and encrypted EBS volumes.

Do you think a traditional data center can hold up to this standard of data security while providing monitoring and logging capabilities for compliance and audits? We bet no!

Data Replication

The latest innovations in data replication are baked into the public cloud. You can use S3 Replication Time Control (S3 RTC) to replicate your data in the same AWS region or across different regions, in a predictable time frame. S3 RTC replicates 99.99% of new objects stored in Amazon S3 within 15 minutes (backed by a service level agreement).

Data Privacy

Public cloud companies continually monitor the evolving privacy regulatory and legislative landscape to identify changes and determine which actions and tools are needed. They’ve invested billions in making their data centers and services ultra-secure, resilient, and compliant with every data privacy law under the sun.

Public cloud providers work with government organizations that have some of the strictest data security requirements on the planet. They are mandated to log every access to your data, which you can request at any time. They’ll never use your data — and if you’re worried they will, they’ll let you bring your own encryption key so they can’t. Data privacy is a top concern for everyone, but once you understand how the public cloud providers manage your data, you’ll be completely at ease that your data is safe.

Take AWS for example. AWS has received numerous internationally-recognized certifications and accreditations, demonstrating compliance with rigorous international standards, such as ISO 27017 for cloud security, ISO 27701 for privacy information management, and ISO 27018 for cloud privacy.

Data Compliance

60% of companies see security and compliance as major barriers to cloud adoption. But the real question that needs to be asked is: ”Do your security and compliance investments and provisions exceed those of the public cloud giants?” Answer: No.

AWS has a robust set of controls, standards, and security certifications, broken down by country, to cover the wide variety of data compliance issues around the globe. The AWS team regularly assesses its infrastructure for vulnerabilities and uses firewalls, Identity, and access management (IAM) tools, and also helps you create a disaster recovery plan. Read up on why high-profile banks, the US gov institutes, and NASDAQ uses AWS for their security needs.

Dive into Google Cloud’s compliance resource center. And did you know that Microsoft Azure allows users to take advantage of more than 90 compliance certifications, including over 50 specific to global regions and countries?

Software Development

Continuous Innovation

The public cloud giants have architected their software from the ground up to automatically deploy new features, configuration changes, bug fixes, etc. safely and quickly in a “continuous delivery” manner. As a result, your development team can refocus this time and energy on launching new services to market faster, and better serve your customers.

Just learn from CapitalOne, who eliminated 8 data centers and took their feature development to market deployment velocity from months and years to days and weeks.

Databases

Where do your database applications and business-critical data reside? Is your approach for managing and scaling this part of your business “future-proof?” Gartner says that by 2022, 75% of all databases will be deployed or migrated to the public cloud.

Are you suffering from performance and scalability issues because you’re still using SQL databases designed to run on physical infrastructure? Can your IT team support multiple database stacks from SQL to graph databases, key value store to in memory databases? The hyperscalers can. Cut the cord and modernize your approach, companies like AirBnB and Vodafone have made the move.

APIs & Integrations

Research shows that poor integration costs businesses every year due to lost orders, inaccurate data, and cumbersome onboarding processes. This can all be solved by moving to a public cloud-based approach that inherently leverages APIs.

The future is built on APIs. In fact, Jeff Bezos was so passionate about this that he famously issued an API manifesto in 2002, which is often seen as the cornerstone of Amazon’s success. In the public cloud sandbox, everybody plays together nicely. Every service is designed with an open API so it can be used by any other service. Our CEO has taken Jeff Bezos’ famous manifesto to heart and adopted it for Totogi. All services we build have documented APIs that other Totogi services use, just like our customers. No backend workarounds, just open APIs. The possibilities are endless!

Whitepaper

Data Regulations Whitepaper

Your data is safe in the public cloud. This white paper explains how hyperscalers enable telcos to specify where their data resides and how they can encrypt it to meet the evolving regulatory requirements.

Download now