To keep pace with evolving technological advancements and changing customer demands, service providers are required to reinvent their networks. Reflecting on the past year, multiple trends have had a substantial impact on the telecommunications industry.
Cyberthreats are evolving, forcing service providers to make investments in advanced measures to protect their networks and prevent disruption of services to customers. The rollout of 5G networks continues to charge ahead, requiring new architectures that ensure that the network can support a growing number of connected devices and efficiently scale up or down based on demand. Finally, AI-driven automation has affected processes across telecom operations, playing an increased role in optimizing network management and improving overall efficiency.
As we progress into the new year, here’s how I anticipate these three trends will continue to impact service providers in 2024.
#1: DDoS attacks will continue grow and be even more disruptive
In October, internet infrastructure providers Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Cloudflare, weathered the largest known distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, with the requests per second peaking at over 398 million. For context, this is seven and a half times larger than the previous record-breaking DDoS attack.
Unfortunately, there will be no stopping the continued growth in DDoS attacks in 2024. This will be highly disruptive for the telecom industry and its customers – putting critical systems at risk, undercutting service level agreements, and bringing unwanted headlines.
Beyond seeing a greater number of DDoS attacks, bad actors will continue to refine their methods and evolve their execution capabilities – meaning these attacks will also become increasingly sophisticated. For example, a growing percentage of DDoS attacks will be multi-vector, meaning bad actors will unleash concurrent attacks on the same target using multiple different protocols. This increases the effectiveness of the attacks and complicates the ability to rapidly identify and mitigate them.
Identifying and stopping DDoS attacks has become a necessary part of every service provider’s business strategy. Providers will need to think critically about their DDoS detection and mitigation capabilities – and take action if they’re not up to par.
#2: IMS deployments in MNO networks will finally be cloud-native
In 2024, expect to see additional production network deployments of cloud-native network functions (CNFs) for specific applications. While CNF implementations have been deployed for several years for OSS/BSS applications, this will expand to core network functions that enhance the services that communications service providers sell. This is because cloud-native will be a way for providers to provide better service, greater agility, and faster deployment as they diversify their service offerings to meet customer needs. A leading cloud-native implementation will be of the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) core solution, required to provide 4G and 5G voice services.
Furthermore, we’ll see cloud-native deployments of analytics applications complement cloud native IMS deployments, specifically to provide observability and actionable insights into Voice over LTE (4G) and Voice over New Radio (5G) services. This will be an important development to enable secure and reliable multimedia communications and, in turn, ensure satisfactory user experiences. On a related note, while most of these cloud-native IMS core deployments will be on MNO private clouds, it is quite likely there will be some MNOs who will make the decision to deploy their IMS core applications on a public cloud.
To fully embrace the transition to cloud-native, it’s important to call out that providers should be ready to answer a variety of questions to identify the best solution for their needs and workloads, whether that’s a public, private, or hybrid option. This includes questions about how to handle automation, upgrades, observability, and which cloud model to invest in.
#3: AIOps will break into CSP core networks
Like CNF deployments, as we progress through 2024, AIOps will break into the core networks of communication service providers. Because of its ability to analyze vast amounts of network and system data in real-time, AI operations can provide significant benefits to providers in the form of enhanced operational efficiency and network performance. This could be realized through identifying traffic patterns to optimize resource allocation and network configurations and detecting issues or anomalies in the network to proactively address potential problems before they impact services.
Specifically, we can expect an uptick in LLM-based AIOps for applications that have well-articulated ROI benefits, as these will likely outweigh service providers’ uncertainty about moving to new operational practices. Test automation, for example, is a use case that will take a leading role for AIOps adoption. This is because it directly minimizes multiple pain points and it reduces the costs that every service provider faces for new software deployments or software release upgrades. Test automation has a clear ROI based on diminishing complexity, reducing operational cycle times and costs, and off-loading work from understaffed resources. And even better, it also means software and network security are kept more current and new features and capabilities can be deployed sooner.
This adoption, however, is a journey and will most likely be based on a provider’s level of trust in the vendors who provide AIOps applications.
For communications service providers looking to take this year by storm, it will be imperative to embrace emerging technologies just as much as preparing for evolving risks. While the former allows for superior quality of service and faster deployments, establishing security ensures continuous service, and both are necessary to maintain customer satisfaction. Service providers who recognize that both are critical to their businesses will thrive as we march toward the future.
