COVID-19: Five Recommendations for Telco IT Leaders

Market analysts at Omdia have been assessing the COVID-19’s impact on the global data center and IT industry. Cliff Grossner, senior director of research for Omdia’s Cloud and Data Center Research Practice, has put together this list of recommendations for telco IT decision makers to help them adjust to the new reality. After reading Cliff’s recommendations, be sure to visit Omdia’s dedicated page for free resources the analysts are offering to help practitioners and vendors deal with the challenges presented by the pandemic.

Five Recommendations for Telco IT Decision Makers

Prepare for remote work influx with SD-WAN. Business operations to support employees have changed for the long term with an acceleration in adoption of remote working. There will be additional demand for services to connect and secure remote workers in their home. This will be an opportunity to accelerate sales of SD-WAN.

Capitalize on increased cloud connectivity demand. As organizations shift additional workloads to cloud service provider data centers for increased automation, SaaS to support remote workers, or for disaster recovery, connectivity capacity demands will increase. This is also an opportunity to offer new services that enable cloud on-ramp and monitoring for customers that are building out their multi-clouds.

Increase partnerships with edge application providers. Low-latency demanding applications, such as gaming and home schooling, can benefit from computing placed at edge locations near the end user, such as telco-run regional data centers and central offices. This is a good opportunity for collaboration between telco and cloud service providers to meet needs of end users connecting from home.

Plan to accelerate NVFi and CDN deployments. The efficiency and automation brought by moving from an appliance-based to a software-based IT infrastructure will be necessary to navigate the business challenges thrust upon telcos by the pandemic. We can expect significant demand increase to support people asked to shelter in place.

Step up marketing and deploying edge services. The ability to run factories and on-premises data centers unattended will become a priority during this pandemic and will remain a requirement long after COVID-19 is behind us. Edge services that allow additional sensor data to be collected and processed in real-time will see additional demand.

See also: COVID-19: Five Recommendations for Enterprise IT Leaders