Carrier-Grade Distributed Cloud Computing: Demands, Challenges, Designs, and Future Perspectives

Demands And Current Efforts Of Cloud Services Provided By Telecommunication Operators

Through constructing large data centers, TOs may deliver Service-Level Agreement (SLA) guaranteed flexible services to individual consumers and enterprise customers using centralized management system to orchestrate cloud services, such as computing, storage, and networking,. Cloud computing may reduce the cost by 75% for introducing new applications to markets, and it has be estimated that, in 2014, 80% of the software would be provided to individuals and enterprises in the form of SaaS (Software as a service), meanwhile, over 90% of the companies or organizations would provide mobile applications based on cloud computing. Virtualization technologies may help network operators reduce CAPEX (Capital Expenditure) investment, reducing OPEX (Operating Expense) cost through deploying automatic management systems as well as adding new profitable services into service catalogs, such as cloud storage, virtual machine lease and cloud application hosting services, and so on. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and some other IT (Information Technology) companies have been investigating cloud computing for several years, and have successfully launched chargeable service for both individuals and business customers. According to a market research report by Gartner, it has been forecasted that the worldwide cloud computing-related investment would grow from 2.85 billion Euros in 2011 to 8.08 billion euros in 2014 (Ben Ping, 2010). It has been estimated that, in 2014, the investment in three areas of SaaS, PaaS (Platform as a Service), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) in China would achieve 861 million euros, and the relevant annual compound growth rate would reach 38.2%.