By Telecom Lead Team: 70 percent of respondent operators
are investing in cloud services in anticipation of demand. The top operator
strategies for offering cloud services are bundling cloud services with network
connectivity services and offering cloud services over Ethernet or IP VPN
services.
Many of the smaller data center providers participating
in Infonetics’ survey plan to keep their business uncomplicated by moving from
simple collocation support offerings to IaaS via the addition of computer and
storage hardware, rather than getting into the complexities of offering OS
software platforms.
95 percent of respondent operators offer IaaS now.
More sophisticated offerings like platform as a service,
or PaaS (formed by the addition of server operating systems such as Windows,
Linux, and Unix) and software as a service, or SaaS (such as e-mail and security
services offered by telcos and ICPs like Google) are currently offered by fewer
operators, but will grow significantly by 2013.
Service providers around the world have embraced the
cloud concept in earnest and are heavily investing in new services and service
delivery platforms based on their particular areas of expertise. Internet
content providers are leading with SaaS, data center and co-location operators
are adding IaaS to their product portfolios and investing in additional
infrastructure facilities, and traditional telcos are building on their
existing networks and adding a range of services,” said Sam Barnett, Infonetics Research‘s directing analyst for
data center and cloud.
Recently Infonetics Research announced that nearly every service provider interviewed by Infonetics expects to
increase security spending over the next year, in absolute dollars and as a
percent of capex.
The biggest drivers for service providers to deploy new
security solutions are protection of customer data, network uptime, changes in
the data center, and the increasing number and complexity of security threats.
The convergence of network traffic growth and increased
security threats has spurred telecom operators to make investments in all areas
of security, from basic firewalls and DDoS prevention to advanced protection
against web-borne threats.
Data center consolidation and
upgrades is forcing many service providers to invest in security solutions at
two ends of the spectrum: extremely high performance hardware solutions that
can handle hundreds of Gigabits to Terabits of traffic, and virtual appliances
installed on virtualized servers.
