Network Data Layer: A New Way To Look At Data In Telecommunication Networks

Jan Häglund is the President and CEO of Enea, a specialist in software for telecommunications and cybersecurity.

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Every telecom system is bursting with information about subscribers, services and devices—not to mention the telco’s network equipment and operational status. This data is both sensitive and necessary for the core business, and there is even greater sensitivity in mobile communications (compared to fixed), as location and current session information are needed to establish and maintain connectivity.

Recent data breaches and network outages in telecom operator networks have made headlines and eroded trust, given the large-scale effects on customers and the business operations of the telecom operator itself. Business owners must pay the highest level of attention to how data is stored, distributed and shared among multiple applications in the networks.

Against this backdrop, where data is a critical asset and the rules of access and storage security urgently need harmonizing, there is another business imperative—managing overall costs. Telecom operators are under pressure to continue delivering dividends to shareholders while undertaking extensive modernization programs. These programs are needed to simultaneously reset operators’ cost base and processes while equipping them with architectural platforms that support service innovation as well as drive efficiency and quality through automation.

For most operators, this means moving to hybrid cloud environments, migrating legacy systems and creating a strategic architecture to develop new services on 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) that can scale. The software infrastructure to do this depends on data just as much as it does on new containerized or cloud-native environments. After all, the data provisioned for new devices must be stored somewhere, as does the data generated as users move around.

The Challenges Of Data

This all seems quite logical, so one might wonder why many telcos find themselves in such an expensive dilemma. Simply put, as networks have evolved, each application and system has brought its own data storage with it. An operator may find today that it has data spread across dozens of different systems—perhaps duplicated, not synchronized and certainly not under its full control to plan and manage.

Industry initiative Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) first formulated the idea of looking at data as a common, key asset in its paper on a “network data layer concept.” The tenets of this paper are that operational change is not just about the platform that the software is running on but also about the data it needs to perform its task and the outputs it generates as it completes its function. Without considering a common approach to data, the result will be a patchwork of technical approaches leading to varying access times, cost of operation and potential inhibition to move to large-scale new IT environments.

Moving from concept to reality is harder. In most telecom infrastructures, you are dealing with incumbent players whose inertia is not just about change but also about losing control of the data. As data is inherent to a specific function or application, the ownership of that data becomes a leverage point that vendors of the various functions are not motivated to give up. This is also why we see that the network data layer concept has ownership of the data model at its heart and puts the right to change and customize it into the hands of the owner of the data—the mobile communication service provider.

Where We Are Now—And The Path Forward

The imperative to manage costs, modernize and set a strategic direction for a more distributed network is increasing. Telecom operators are forging new relationships with cloud vendors, such as AT&T collaborating with Microsoft Azure and Verizon partnering with AWS. Telcos need to simplify and control their data models to develop and deploy AI and automation. Additional examples of using data in new ways include:

• Deutsche Telekom partnering with Google to innovate new services and user experiences.

• Telstra joining forces with Quantium AI to support B2B applications, customer analytics, fraud detection and operations.

The adoption of 5G standards and interworking has matured (in the 5G environment, data is treated as resources and addressed by URLs) and acted as an enabler for change. Implementing 5G core standard is an ideal point of change, yet a joint view of data structures for different network functions is missing.

A simpler, strategic way to handle data in telecom networks, based on a network data layer concept, can save both time and costs for service providers struggling today to improve their profit margins in a competitive industry with increasing operational costs. Additionally, new revenue streams (based on the monetization of subscriber and network data) are possible, provided limitations around data access are overcome.

In preparing to transition to a network data layer, the operator should start by building a map of the essential data they rely on for business and ensuring that they have a model and description of how data records relate to each other and which applications are using them. The second level is to look at new use cases (5G being an example) to see what data and interfaces will be added to the business. A third level is to understand where the technology is going for storing and sharing data while considering costs and the security of storage. Data security is a key element both in simple physical data resilience as well as in data management, access privileges, encryption, protection and auditing.

Overall, it can seem like a daunting task, but a phased approach—starting perhaps with less critical applications before approaching mission-critical data—can help develop a new regime of data management standards for the business.

It’s time to get the fundamentals right, and a common network data layer is key to achieving this.

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