Latin American telecom operators such as Liberty Latin America are ramping up their migration to the cloud to benefit from cost reduction and increased operational efficiency.
“The strategy is to have a public-private cloud mix, keeping latency-sensitive applications local in our private cloud and moving less critical infrastructure to the public cloud,” chief technology and product officer Aamir Hussain tells BNamericas.
The group has turned to several cloud providers, including Microsoft, under a multi-cloud strategy. It is reviewing several server and storage solutions to optimize computing power and storage cost.
“We have been working with our vendors to deploy the portions of our new platforms that are available to be hosted in the public cloud while migrating our core network components to virtual and containerized solutions in our private cloud,” Hussain adds.
LLA aims to reap cloud gains mostly through a reduced time-to-market for new product launches. In addition to its own cloud transformation, the group offers cloud services to its B2B customers, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Disaster Recovery as a Service, and Backup as a Service, which are provided from 11 commercial datacenters in the region.
According to Hussain, Liberty Latin America is not considering selling or decommissioning its existing datacenters as part of its cloud migration.
For its B2B customer offering, LLA uses a mix of solutions from VMWare, Geminaire, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Red Hat, Microsoft, Commvault and Infrascale.
TIM
Brazil’s TIM, on the other hand, has set a goal to fully migrate to the cloud and decommission all of its IT datacenters as part of its digital transformation.
Dubbed Journey to Cloud, TIM's cloud transformation officially kicked off in March 2021. The telco expects to have 100% of its IT applications running on the Oracle and Microsoft platforms by end-2023.
“It involves digitizing all processes, including service and relationship platforms. With these two clouds, TIM will have an ultra-speed connection and service availability to maintain its systems with the highest levels of security. This is an investment that prepares the carrier for 5G,” TIM CIO Auana Mattar tells BNamericas.
Among the benefits cited by Mattar are operational redundancy and a reduced carbon footprint in line with the telco’s goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030. TIM also expects to reduce recurrent IT spending by around 25% by 2023.
“This way, we are able to have more room to spend on innovation, and not simply to run the cost of the IT machinery,” she says
TIM has already migrated the customer relationship management (CRM) platforms for prepaid, postpaid and TIM Live (fixed broadband) to the cloud. It has also migrated its call routing and billing platforms.
For this year, the goal is to conclude the migration of systems related to channels and wholesale operations, Auana added. For next year, it seeks to virtualize most of its network functions.
At the same time that it will give up its IT datacenters, TIM intends to build a decentralized network of edge datacenters, thus taking content and data processing closer to the end users. At present, the telco has 46 such datacenters spread across Brazil, and plans to reach 67 in 2023.
Telecom Argentina
Telecom Argentina also has a multi-cloud migration strategy that began to take shape in 2020, first with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and then with Google Cloud Platform.
The operator, with presence in both Argentina and Paraguay, ended 2021 with 29 of its applications running in the cloud, up from 16 in 2020, a company spokesperson told BNamericas.
For this year, Telecom Argentina plans to scale up the process to have more cloud-native applications, both for its core operations as well as to support new digital businesses.
The telco intends to integrate its on-premises infrastructure with the public clouds, without making large hardware investments in its on-premises infrastructure.
For the offering of cloud services to B2B clients, Telecom has closed agreements with IBM Cloud, Google Cloud, AWS and Huawei since last year.
The company will not deactivate its IT datacenters, according to its spokesperson, and will expand its edge computing centers. The company has three national datacenters located in different locations in Buenos Aires, totaling 3,000 m² of area and with Tier 2 or Tier 3 certifications.
“This converged infrastructure model allows us to efficiently manage the resources deployed in all our datacenters, with centralized processes, architecture and management. At the same time, Telecom continues to advance in the virtualization of its datacenters through different projects of consolidation, technology replacement, application efficiency and systems convergence,” the company said.
América Móvil and Telefónica are also migrating part of their workloads to the cloud. The Mexican telco’s migration process has gained momentum recently with 5G preparations.
"In recent years we have expanded the transmission network, renewed systems and automated network operations, transferred applications to the cloud and taken the latest technology to base stations," Daniel Hajj, CEO of América Móvil, said in February.
The company has no plans to decommission datacenters as part of the cloud drive.
The Mexican group managed 31 datacenters at the end of 2021, offering IaaS and Software as a Service cloud solutions to customers.
In addition to its own cloud, América Móvil has partnerships with AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google Cloud.
Source: https://www.bnamericas.com/en/features/the-cloud-transformation-of-latam-telcos