Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:24):
Hello, you are watching our special program on the power of hybrid cloud automation in telecoms networks. I'm Guy Daniels and in today's discussion we are going to look at how to reduce the complexities of implementing cloud-based networks through automation in order to improve operational efficiency and accelerate digital transformation. And I'm pleased to say that joining me on the program are Manish Mangal, who is CTO Telecom and Global Business Head Network Services for Tech Mahindra Harkirit Singh, who is CEO of Ascend Digital Solutions Limited, and Azhar Sayeed senior director, TME Technology and Strategy at Red Hat. Hello everyone. It's good to see you all. Now let me start by asking how can this idea of a hybrid and multi-cloud automation help improve network scalability for CSPs and Azhar, let me come across and get your thoughts on this first,

Azhar Sayeed, Red Hat (01:31):
Absolutely thank you guy for the opportunity. But if you look at the challenges some of these talk hosts, CSPs are facing, they want capacity expansion, they want on demand capability. Now if you take the multi companion cloud, what it is about multim Companion Cloud is about actually creating additional capacity for scale and performance through a hybrid cloud footprint across multiple public clouds. So how it's done is it's actually orchestrated together, it's managed together in terms of workload deployment is flexible across your private environment as well as the public cloud environment. So in terms of scalability specifically, imagine you want to be able to burst into the public cloud for capacity where you're running into some challenges with respect to capacity and you want to be able to scale there. You can immediately light up the cloud platform within the public cloud and move workloads across, use that additional capacity for scale and then tear it down the moment your workload, actually the traffic load or the network load declines.

(02:47):
So it's an easy way to light up capacity on a click button. It's highly automated in terms of this whole multi-cloud companion capability. And this is actually the partnership we've done with Tech Mahindra to use components from Red Hat like a CM OpenShift to manage those clusters and then NetOps AI from Tech M to be able to actually orchestrate those workloads across diverse environments, create the network connectivity across and so on. So that's how you're able to actually scale and that's really how you're able to address that question of scalability in terms of how multi mode cloud companion helps.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:27):
Great. Thanks very much Azhar and we'll be hearing more about that during our discussion. But for now, let me go across to Manish. What are your thoughts of how this approach can help with scalability?

Manish Mangal, Tech Mahindra (03:37):
No, absolutely. I think the world that we are living in and the way we are thinking about designing and operating the network of the future, the cloud is a fundamental infrastructure to that, right? We are now at a stage in the industry where every pretty much every technology, whether it's a network or the IT systems, they're all cloud native. So the foundational element of the cloud is absolutely important to really create a common infrastructure on which variety of different applications can sit. And the benefit of having a multi mode companion cloud architecture is that it basically gives a great combination of a public-private hybrid cloud, and you can add on capacity, modify delete on an on-demand basis through the combination of the cloud infrastructure and the kind of scalability that our customers need today is absolutely important. The part that I will also add along with the scalability is the fact that we need that level of dynamic cloud environment availability for the reliability.

(04:43):
Also our customers, customer's customer, whether it's a B2C or a B2B are expecting a 24 by seven more than five nine available infrastructure and a hundred percent availability of the service. So for that kind of an environment to be able to fully support it, a multi-port cloud environment is great, but that's not just enough. I think automation is very important and as I said that one of the reasons why we actually created NetOps or AI is to really automate the entire lifecycle of how the different workloads can reside from the plan design all the way to the operations lifecycle for this network and IT workloads on the multi world cloud. So we believe that this is a fantastic architecture to give the ability for our customers to scale up and down the capacity and the capability through the multi-cloud approach, multi companion cloud.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:40):
Thanks very much, Manish. Well, let's expand that now. And Harkirit, let me ask this next question to you. How has the telecoms industry leveraged hybrid cloud automation and overcome the challenges? And what tangible business benefits do you think have emerged from this approach based on your own expertise and experience?

Harkirit Singh, Ascend Digital Solutions (06:02):
Yeah, thanks guy. I think as Manish said, so this is an error of clouds and cloud native technologies that are transforming the way we consume services applications, and building a hybrid cloud environment provides that elasticity and on demand capabilities to actually create, what do you call as instances to deliver those content services and application. From a CSP perspective, from our side of the things we are in the market in Ghana, we are providing cloud services to both private sector and the public sector. What we have seen is the requirements on both the sites are same in terms of availability of the services, in terms of on demand, in terms of utilization or capacity, in terms of ensuring that the services can be scaled as and when the demand increases and utilization and creating efficiencies and building that economies of scale is critical to actually deliver the services in the telecom sector as of today.

(07:11):
Whereas on the public sector side, the demand is predominantly on securing the services, which means that the instances to be on premise and to leave as much as capacity as required, as minimum, I would say on the public cloud side of things. But the architecture itself, like the multi-mode cloud that we are talking about and building up the instances to deliver business critical services around disaster recovery are also very critical. So from a business standpoint of view, the cloud technologies are delivering efficiencies to CSPs, to the telecom market and building an infrastructure that can be actually shared and utilized across multi-tenants and also provide the level of availability of services and the delivery of content at speed and at scale that is needed to drive revenue growth and also the profitability.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (08:09):
Yeah, absolutely. Very interesting. Thank you Harkirit. Manish, let's ask that one to you as well. What benefits are you seeing here?

Manish Mangal, Tech Mahindra (08:16):
Yeah, I think it's, and Harkirit said it extremely well, and I'll just add maybe one comment to that, which is really the on demand nature of it. The customer expectations are always there, which are varying. So you have an environment and a situation where you have a traffic surge. Let's say you have a certain event that has happened. And to accommodate for situations like that, traditionally we could not design the network for that kind of a peak capacity. And as a result, what we had done was that the customer experience suffers at that time. And during those time is one when actually the needs are even higher. So an environment like that can very easily be accommodated with a hybrid cloud environment where you can add on capacity very quickly. I mean, that's a very tangible, immediate business benefit. But the other things that we are also watching is that the networks are also getting more complex.

(09:15):
So there are more likely scenarios where we will see certain segments of the network facing outage or certain specific platform having certain outages because of whatever issues of complexity during those times is when you need the ability to actually hand the traffic over to alternate platform and being able to sustain and continue that one. And of course, you don't want to build the capacity of 50%, 70% additional capacity to cover up for those kinds of scenarios, which is why a dynamic environment can be an extremely, extremely important for the customer to use it. And this is just more of a how do you use the dynamic nature of add, modified, delete capacity on demand, but the benefit of the cloud native architecture and the automation of how do you manage the network that's now proven, the total cost of ownership for that kind of a network architecture is absolutely given, and I don't expect any network or even the IT systems to be built in the future that are not going to be cloud native anymore.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (10:18):
Absolutely. Thank you Manish for that. And Azhar, what are you seeing here?

Azhar Sayeed, Red Hat (10:23):
So if you look at the sizes of networks that are being deployed today, our sizes of infras cloud infrastructure, private cloud infrastructure that's being deployed today, it's already getting to thousands and thousands of devices, servers, both at the core data centers and as well as edge and far edge with respect to ran and some of the other new services like iot, how gateways are being deployed Now, those are all servers off the shelf, commercial, off the shelf servers. Now, in order to manage that size of a network and infrastructure, you'd absolutely need scale, but you also need to look at things like what are the overall cost of optimizations? What does my security posture applied? How do I lifecycle manage these applications across my entire footprint? Now, this is just on the private side. The moment you add a public cloud component to this through the multi more cloud companion cloud, now you're talking about, again, multiplying those set of connections and now you need to maintain the security posture, the cost modeling and optimization and lifecycle management across that entire infrastructure.

(11:31):
So by doing this multi more companion cloud, what you can do is you can, A, as Manish said, and our also said earlier, is you can create these on the fly. So which means you only use it when you need it and then you actually back away from it when you don't. That's one, two, you can create a consistent posture across all of that environments with respect to security and security management because every public cloud environment is different through this specific architecture, you are actually abstracting those public cloud environments to create a common automation environment and a common security posture across their entire infrastructure, which is extremely critical because that's exactly where products like Red Hat OpenShift and products like NetOps AI really help in bringing that value together. So from a business value perspective, you have now a consistent infrastructure that's highly scalable and flexible, and you now have a highly cost optimized and a most efficient infrastructure to be able to use and utilize. That's really where the business value shines through in terms of how you can build this.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (12:43):
Thank you, Azhar. This is really fascinating. And Harkirit, I'd like to ask you now, what use cases are you considering for cloud-based networks, including hybrid cloud scenarios?

Harkirit Singh, Ascend Digital Solutions (12:55):
I think some of the use cases that we're looking at is, what do you call e go services? So building GCloud, which is like a government cloud on an E go net infrastructure that actually provides the level of scalability, security, and automation to bring lots of EO services on a cloud-based infrastructure and have that capability of a hybrid cloud environment, multi cloud environment to bring up the level of scalability that is needed when the demand for those services increases. So the use cases could be e passport services, eHealth services, education services, and we are using this whole infrastructure cloud native infrastructure to build a lot of digital use cases and rank a lot of people out of the digital divide and deliver the services on demand, what we call as twenty four seven services where the citizens can actually log into any applications and connect to these cloud services to get their their passports, get their licenses, get them registered for any birth.

(14:05):
So I think that is one of the main use cases that we are implementing as we go along. And also with that kind of infrastructure besides availability comes all the disaster recovery and the ease and the flexibility of actually switching when any such event that happens that allows us to actually start building up on the business continuity and disaster recovery centers. So that is one of the key use cases we are helping to get the government digitally enabled to deliver citizen-centric services in Ghana. The second, and the other key model that we're bringing up is on the level of the telecom network. We are building up a cloud native infrastructure for what you call as a network, as a service that allows us to onboard any ISPs, anys and deliver them capacity on demand and share a piece of the network to deliver to their end customers the capacity and services they need on voice data, specifically in any content and application that needs to be driven through a cloud multi-channel environment and have that ability to scale. So we are working on both the use cases, one on the digitization of the government and delivering the services that the citizens need. And the second thing on the infrastructure level, working with the ISPs and MNOs to deliver them capacity on demand.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (15:36):
Great. Thanks Harkirit for going through those examples with us. Very interesting. I'd like to expand now about how Red Hat and Tech Mahindra's latest innovation, the multi-mode companion cloud automation contributes to CSPs overall digital transformation strategies around hybrid cloud networks. Now, we've mentioned this earlier in our conversation, but Manish, perhaps we could go into this in more detail.

Manish Mangal, Tech Mahindra (16:05):
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think there are three fundamental category of the problems that we are seeing to be addressed by the telecom service providers for their businesses. Number one is that how do you use your capital most efficiently, which is the new introduction of a new technology like hybrid cloud. What is the best way to spend that money? And I think what we discussed really the ability to build capacity on demand that actually helps a very effective use of the CapEx. You don't have to sink in capital upfront and that allows you to really build the capacity as you need it and a huge benefit. The second thing is really around how do you most effectively utilize your opex or how do you use the automation? And now with more and more of the AI where you can do predictive things, how do you drive the operating cost lower of an infrastructure, which really gives you a total cost of ownership advantages.

(17:07):
And that's where the NetApps AI work that we have done, the platform that we have created and its ability to automate and orchestrate the end-to-end life cycle with AI enabled into that or embedded into that is a very great approach of driving that overall operating cost lower for the CSPs. And the third is really driving the customer experience, and that's where the use cases like disaster recovery comes into the picture very prominently for the service provider where they have certain outage situations, then the on-demand disaster recovery can be created and support all the network traffic without impacting the customer experience. So I think when we look at the value of what we have been working together with Red Hat in creating this multi mode cloud companion and enabling at the end of the day how it helps CapEx, opex and the customer experience for the customer, we believe it's a great alternative, great opportunity to the traditional architectures while keeping in mind the primary three concerns that we are addressing for the customers.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (18:14):
Great. Thanks Manish and Azhar, can you add some further insights here for us?

Azhar Sayeed, Red Hat (18:18):
Yeah, if I take a step back and look at that overall architecture, I mean I think Manish was describing this a little bit, but I may, let me just double click on a few things. There is the physical infrastructure on which it could be on-prem or public cloud. There is a CAS layer that actually manages deployment of those nodes and clusters. And then there is a management layer, which is what actually manages this part of the CAS component. And then there's the orchestration of all of those different applications that need to go across these infrastructures. So if we actually take these components, you need to integrate them together and do full stack automation to be really benefit from this type of a complete hybrid deployment model. That full stack automation comes through with this joint solution between Red Hat and Tech Mahindra with NetOps AI being the main orchestrator, a CM being the cluster manager, and then the infrastructure components that are using Kubernetes to manage those nodes and those clusters across private or public.

(19:33):
Now if you take, what this will allow you to do is really automate or hyper automate things to do what? To deploy any kind of workloads to even look into the future. In terms of today you're deploying as said, e-government type of services, which is it potentially to your clients. Now tomorrow you want to be able to deploy some AI workloads and model training. Model training requires extensive compute capability where you need to be able to be flexible in terms of using that compute wherever it resides, whether it is in public cloud or private cloud. How can you elastically expand and do that with modern training? How can you then take that model that you've developed and go deploy it towards the edge of far edge to do model inferencing for the actual service or the workload that you're designing? So those are some things that are really now possible in a seamless manner without the end user or the CSP having to worry about how do I build these type of capability in each one of those siloed environments. That's really where this shines in terms of providing a common environment, common operational model, common automation model, and easy to deploy services in terms of point click across the board.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (20:56):
Thanks very much. This are some very interesting possibilities emerging here. Harkirit, let me come back to you because earlier you covered a couple of interesting use cases there, but can you now elaborate on specific examples or case studies where hybrid cloud automation has directly contributed to improving telco's business outcomes such as reducing operational costs or accelerating time to market or enhancing the customer experience? Have you got any further insights for us please?

Harkirit Singh, Ascend Digital Solutions (21:29):
So we had an issue with one of our, you can say large infrastructure company that is delivering energy to the market and they had a big security issue on their own IT infrastructure last year and they reached out to us and said, guys, you have a cloud platform. We have certain applications which we are running on the public, and there are certain data, user data that we are actually hosting on, basically on our own servers. Can you guys help us and take all of these instances, which included smart meters, six different applications, and actually delivering services to more than almost, I would say four to 5 million homes in the country. And it was a very critical state because being one of the biggest grid electricity providers in the country, that would have to be, you can say, migrated from where they were into first into the data center, host them, basically manage hosting, and then actually porting all of their applications on the cloud and help them to actually deliver services back to their customers, which includes both the businesses and the consumers.

(22:55):
So we had a GCloud platform, what do you call government cloud, which is both on on-premise and hybrid. We were able to use the whole compute storage that we had. We were able to actually spin up additional compute and storage on the public and we able to transition them within about 72 hours and get their services up and running within a week's time. If we were actually looking at a traditional model of anything that is related to non-native, non-cloud based infrastructure, this kind of switch and migration would take us months. But we were able to, right from the time we had the call with them to the time they were up and running on the environment, it was about within about seven days we were able to host that. So I think, so from a business perspective, the speed, I would say the acceleration of getting an environment which was hosted on their own IT infrastructure, bring them into a data center and then get them the services on a hybrid cloud was a key. You can say differentiator from anything that has been done before. So what we see as a business potential is speed, accuracy, resiliency, security elasticity, and the scale that the cloud infrastructures are delivering for businesses in scenarios where they get more secure services, most foster services scale on demand and still have their ability for improving their business continuity through disaster recovery as well.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (24:44):
Excellent. Thank you very much Harkirit. And Azhar, let's come across to you for some additional comments.

Azhar Sayeed, Red Hat (24:49):
Yeah, just briefly, I think Harkirit already mentioned a solid use case and an example. I was going to just add to a few things because my conversation with different providers across the globe has been very similar. People who were so much interested in just deploying their own private cloud environment are now actively looking to see how they can leverage public cloud for backup disaster recovery scenarios. Especially if you remember some of the outages that have happened recently and they were in the news without naming the customer, without naming, some of those outages were primarily due to some operational issues inside their infrastructure certificate server going down or not being updated or some sort of routing issues inside the network infrastructure, which basically took down their entire network for six hours, eight hours, 10 hours, and so on, which is a significant loss in the context of business to that particular provider.

(25:49):
Now, because of that, they are now actively coming back to say, Hey, is there a way we have public cloud presence within the country, within the region? Is there a way we can actually use public cloud infrastructure to augment, add capability and capacity and switch over in such scenarios in such disaster scenarios? So this is the real, this absolutely that's happening now and increasingly I'm seeing a number of service providers to CSPs actually asking for this kind of a solution. That's why we think this was a very good use case and thank you to send digital for actually making that happen at one of the enterprise customers.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (26:31):
Great. Thanks for that, Azhar. Well, we must leave it there for now. Thank you all very much for taking part in our discussion today. If you would like further information on any of the issues raised in the program, then please follow the links below this video. For now though, thank you for watching and goodbye.