There’s nothing fancy about text messaging, but over the years it’s become an inherent part of every mobile operator’s offering – even supporting critical payment and security applications. It simply must work where and when you need it. Now let’s imagine this critical messaging infrastructure is working fine today, then a demand spike hits, and your business growth and hard-earned reputation is at the mercy of some outdated servers. You’re feeling trapped by legacy technology choices that can no longer support today’s customer traffic demands. It’s time to consider the cloud.
Overcoming Capacity Constraints
Many legacy telecommunications operators struggle with network demands that have grown exponentially and caused their bare metal server infrastructure to fail when its needed most.
Maintaining physical hardware can be difficult and costly. Servers, switches and other equipment often aren’t manufactured locally, so an out-of-box failure means being forced to return equipment and wait weeks for a replacement. Outsourcing maintenance can often require extensive paperwork, cause delays, and complicate logistics.
The biggest issue though for telcos, given the dramatic growth in mobile users and data volumes running through their networks, is capacity. Operators with bare metal server farms must keep growing their server base just to keep up with the organic steady-state growth requirements while also planning for event-based demand spikes. Ballooning physical server infrastructure costs, necessary to support the excess capacity requirements to handle network usage peaks, including larger facilities, greater server counts, and energy consumption, often strain operator business models.
Transitioning to the Telco Cloud
With a future where operators see it no longer makes financial and operational sense to continually maintain and grow their own physical server facilities, they are taking their networks to the cloud.
A private cloud-based software model can offer these key benefits:
Cost Savings: Moving core network infrastructure to the cloud reduces an operator’s need to maintain and upgrade physical infrastructure like hardware and cooling systems. It reduces the financial burden of ‘overbuilding’ with an on-premises hardware model, because with the cloud, additional capacity only needs to be purchased when needed.
Scalability: Network applications that are based in the cloud are more scalable and can accommodate fluctuating workloads, allowing operators to scale up and down quickly with demand – especially useful with usage spikes at certain times of day or during special events.
Resilience: Private clouds can be built to ensure that security, redundancy, and uptime are maintained, so customers get a worry-free experience. Telco network availability is a critical need of operators’ business and consumer users. Avoiding outages, disruptions, and traffic slowdowns is a must for them. With geographically distributed data centers and excess capacity built-in, private clouds can ensure data and services are secure and always available.
Flexibility: Going with a private cloud solution can allow the flexibility for telcos to implement network services and technologies with less risk, while also benefiting from having the computational power to support operational insights from machine learning and artificial intelligence that can be leveraged to improve services and gain an edge over competitors.
Security: By moving core infrastructure to a private cloud, service providers reduce access points and cybersecurity threats and gain an ideal environment for implementing organizational security policies.
Enghouse Migrates Safaricom to a Private Cloud Short Message Service Center (SMSC)
Safaricom, East Africa’s largest telecommunications company with 49 million customers, was pleased with the performance of its Enghouse SMSC, but tired of struggling with the limitations inherent in maintaining its on-premises hardware. It was ready to migrate this functionality to the cloud. But Safaricom was concerned that a big move like this could negatively impact their flagship money transfer, payment, and micro-financing product (M-PESA), which its customers heavily relied upon and was underpinned by Enghouse SMSC.
Migrating critical infrastructure within a live network environment is never taken lightly. Safaricom needed a partner who could deliver not just a private cloud server model for their messaging platform but also could ensure a seamless experience, with no downtime or customer interruption. Safaricom had a prior positive experience working with Enghouse for several years as their legacy messaging platform provider. Safaricom’s IT team learned the Enghouse SMSC platform was available on the cloud and that we had the technical ability to help them transition. Enghouse’s RFP response was also competitively priced. We became the easy choice.
Learn More
To learn more about how Enghouse worked with Safaricom to deliver a seamless migration of its SMSC with zero downtime and no outages, while providing a single messaging platform that could easily scale and was compatible with existing modules and applications, download the full case study.
