Fear of lock-in is main barrier to telco/public cloud partnerships – poll

• TelecomTV’s Telcos and Public Cloud Summit took place recently
• We ran a poll to look at the main barrier to successful partnerships between telcos and public cloud giants
• Perceived risk of lock-in was regarded as the biggest barrier
• There are also concerns about costs

Fear of lock-in and higher-than expected costs are the main barriers to successful partnerships between telcos and hyperscalers, according to the results of a poll conducted during TelecomTV’s recent Telcos and Public Cloud Summit. 

Most telcos now have some kind of relationship with at least one of the main public cloud players – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – but while some strong advocates believe telcos should migrate as much as possible to the hyperscalers’ platforms, there are still some doubts about the suitability of such relationships for all operators across the board.

So we asked the summit’s attendees to vote in our poll: What are the main barriers to successful telco and public cloud partnerships?

Presented with seven options, respondents could vote for as many as they considered correct and applicable. And the votes were widely spread, suggesting there are still a number of significant concerns about some of the partnership opportunities, though it must be noted too that none of the options attracted very high scores. 

The option with the most votes, selected by 52% of those who voted, was ‘The perceived risk of vendor lock-in’ – this concern is often cited by operators that don’t want to be stuck and either unable to shift their workloads, or find it very costly and inefficiency to do so, once they have migrated to a public cloud platform. 

Next came ‘Concerns over public cloud pricing and associated costs’, which attracted votes from 46% of respondents. This is becoming an increasing worry, and there have long been suggestions that using the public cloud is not always as cost effective and flexible as it might seem. 

Closely behind in third place, selected by 45% of respondents, was ‘Security, data sovereignty and regulatory challenges’ – the concerns related to data sovereignty and regulation appear to be particularly strong in Europe. 

‘Fear of losing control of key technology and markets’ was selected by 43% of voters, while ‘Doubts over public cloud resilience for critical services’ attracted votes from 39% of respondents. 

The ‘Cultural differences between telcos and hyperscalers’ are of less (and, we believe, shrinking) concern, it seems, as this option only attracted votes from 25% of respondents, while just 21% believe that ‘Internal resistance from telco operational units’ is a key barrier to successful partnerships between telcos and public cloud giants. 

You can watch all of the sessions from the Telcos and Public Cloud Summit on demand right here. 

Our next digital event is the Open RAN Summit, which takes place on TelecomTV on 21 and 22 June. 

Prior to that, we have our in-person DSP Leaders World Forum in Windsor, UK, on 23 and 24 May, where the six main sessions will be co-hosted by senior telco executives: Check out the full details here. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV