6 digital service provider and telecommunications musts

To successfully compete, boost revenue and profitability, and meet rising customer expectations, telecommunication companies and digital service providers need a sustainable strategy for using public cloud services as part of a hybrid or multicloud architecture. When choosing a particular public cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, you need to know if you can:

• Meet your application or service requirements with its infrastructure.
• Actually lower costs after adding storage, networking, or other services.
• Safely move strategic assets such as network infrastructure to its cloud platform.
• Optimize its services to facilitate more agile operations and culture.

Red Hat can help you address these questions, providing strategic expertise, a robust infrastructure platform that performs consistently across public and private cloud environments, and collaborative support to solve your unique business challenges, so you can innovate more rapidly. This checklist includes six key actions that are essential to a successful public cloud strategy.

You face new competitors that are not weighed down by network infrastructure and have more nimble, scalable development and operational models. These competitors do not take months to deliver new capabilities and services–they do so in weeks or even days. To become more agile, you need solutions that allow:

• Rapid service innovation and deployment.
• The flexibility to develop and deploy with speed and ease in any cloud you choose.
• Faster time to production, letting you choose from a range of supported tools, familiar frameworks, and streamlined workflows. 
• Automated life cycle management, reducing staff time for infrastructure management and help desk support.

Public cloud platforms are an attractive infrastructure resource, but compliance, competitive risk, and even potential outages are key concerns. You need to protect customers' private information, network traffic, and application data from breaches while complying with regulatory and corporate policies. You do not want to expose valuable information about customer usage and service activities. To reduce risk, you need to work with a vendor that:

• Delivers a consistent experience in any public cloud or on-premise environment, allowing your teams to rapidly ramp up and work productively wherever needed.
• Extends the security of applications running on Kubernetes clusters with continuous checks throughout their life cycle and automated updates.
• Can offer managed cloud services built into all major public clouds with access to specialized 24x7 global site reliability engineering (SRE).

Although hyperscalers like Azure and AWS entice telecommunications customers by offering excellent rates for volume spending on their services, you need a platform that:

• Consumes your public cloud commitments whether you prefer self-managed or managed cloud infrastructure.
• Simplifies moves when your infrastructure decisions change as strategic, business, or technology needs evolve.
• Lets you choose the cloud infrastructure that best fits your workloads and requirements.
• Avoids building directly into a hyperscaler’s services so that extracting your workloads and services is less difficult and costly.

A skilled platform management team can prevent repetitive operational tasks from creating downtime, reducing costs and freeing resources for higher-value activities. You need a solution that:

• Offers consistent operations experiences across multicloud environments, reducing complexity and specialization for developer and operations teams.
• Has extended features, such as pipeline building, monitoring, security, and service mesh, which are essential for using Kubernetes effectively.
• Is accompanied by deep expertise and experience delivered through consulting and training services.

Transformation requires ensuring your organizational culture is conducive to highly agile, collaborative, well-performing teams. You need a partner that:

• Can help your teams adopt the open practices and processes that accelerate delivery of improved or new applications and services.
• Helps you build with speed, agility, confidence, and choice, allowing your teams to code in production mode, anywhere you choose. 
• Can help you adopt agile DevOps workflows with verified integration of the latest tools, such as GitOps and the Kubernetes operator framework.
• Is a leader and trusted partner in open source, offering solutions guided by deep expertise.

On average, companies are using 8 cloud platforms. To better manage this complexity, you need a platform that offers:

• Integrated capabilities for running virtual machine-based solutions you still maintain and operate.
• A way for development teams to connect disparate datasets across multiple cloud infrastructures.
• Common management and tools across all infrastructures.
• Options for consuming as a managed service with a financially backed service-level agreement.
• Proactive security, with zero-downtime upgrades and maintenance.