Satellite and Cloud Computing
Today’s webinar, a lively and informative 70-minutes of moderated dialogue, began with an overview of the factors contributing to the satellite industry’s drive to catch-up with other telecoms segments in its cloud adoption, together with an exploration of the advantages of incorporating the cloud into satellite businesses.
Throughout the wide-ranging cloud computing-related discussion which encompassed multiple inter-connected topics such as:
• the convergence of ground stations and data centres
• distributed architectures
• the ‘network of networks’
• satellites as switches in the greater telecommunications network with roaming across all networks enabled by full interoperability between satellite and the telcos
• 5G and IoT
• how the full potential of satellite will be realised through cloud-based virtualisation and
• satellite as one transport option among many
The panellists made frequent reference to the increasing importance of standardisation. The conversation also examined edge-computing in some depth, viewing it as a logical extension of the cloud and virtualisation environment, and as an evolving technical migration for the satellite sector.
Closing the discussion, the panellists offered their perspectives on the strategic long-term future for the evolving relationship between satellite and the cloud, including building on an earlier elaboration that the cloud is not monolithic, with one panellist suggesting that the “network is the cloud”. Reference was also made to perspectives from some quarters of the broad telecoms arena that the adoption of cloud-native platforms and methodologies is happening on a fragmented and siloed basis, leading to a collection of small and differentiated Cloud infrastructures that don’t readily scale.
If you missed the webcast you haven’t missed out. You can join the hundreds of “live” viewers across 76 countries by watching the recording here.
Q & A continued….
The following question was posed through the chat function during the panel but we ran out of time to respond in the live programme. Thank you to our audience for taking an active part by asking questions, and to our panellists for their time to answer them after the webinar ended…
1. How do you see this partnership between SATCOM and Cloud from the point of view of Systems and Customer Support increase in complexity of services and evolution speed increase?
Albie Bester (Intelsat): For Satcom one of the core benefits of the move to cloud is the “Software-first” approach for management and orchestration of any network service in any datacenter. Since services are abstracted from the hardware layer we will be able to create test environments in labs and perform scenario testing against new or updated configurations. This will increase the stability of production environments and reduce system support incidents which will positively impact customer experience. We will be able to do more with less, enhance service agility and provide tighter SLAs.