Leverage the Cloud in the Back Office

By Susan J. Campbell

Taking a platform to the Cloud is a strategy that is gaining more and more attention in the enterprise segment, yet the network back office stands to gain significant value from this migration. It’s no longer enough for the enterprise to drive innovation through cloud-based applications on the customer side of the service provider business; it’s time to take it to the back office.

A recent Alcatel-Lucent Enriching Communications article, Bridging the Cloud to the Network Back Office, explores the fact that cloud services that deliver end-to-end Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to cover the network and IT will differentiate. At the same time, dynamic management for the cloud incorporates a flexible data model and the automation of OSS/BSS. To leverage the most value from these platforms, it’s critical that efficient cloud operations leverage best practices, tools and standards from the IT and telecom worlds.

It’s important that service providers accelerate, differentiate and gain agility as they also scale to offer large volumes of cloud services. New IT services and applications demand faster time-to-market than existing services. Additionally, the cloud environment must address the end-to-end quality of service (QoS) and efficiently handle new business models, increasingly larger volumes of users, a broad range of security requirements and different tiers of service.

With these new requirements, there is a growing need for a symbiotic relationship between the network infrastructure and the cloud when delivering cloud services. To make this relationship a reality for back office support services, it is critical that dynamic management is firmly in place. This dynamic management enables speed, simplification, cost reduction and quality as a result of tools, automation and the use of pre-defined templates to create tiered operations capabilities.

When dynamic management is in place, communication service providers (CSPs) providing cloud services can effectively accelerate the business as intelligence, automation and standardization in the back office is proven to help the CSP to deliver cloud services faster and with fewer hassles, while also driving higher quality and greater visibility.

Dynamic management will also enable the CSP to reduce operating costs as it enables integration and the reuse and streamlining of services to make it easier and more cost effective to integrate new and existing services. Differentiation is also achieved as CSPs combine their network with dynamic management to offer key capabilities to set their services apart from that of the competition.

New partners can be easily supported through the open innovation of the Application Enablement concept as service providers can quickly bring large volumes of cloud services to their customers. The increased business model agility enables these service providers to leverage these new capabilities to quickly discover new revenue streams and greater profitability.