Challenges for BSS Domain Applications to be on Cloud!!!
BSS has its own set of challenges when it comes to IT and data governance. This is mainly because of sensitive customer data, increasing volumes, growing customer demands and challenging market. Key applications to be considered for cloud in this domain are CRM, Customer/Product and Pricing Masters, Fraud management, Mediation, Transactions Rating, Billing, Invoicing, and Financial systems. In the current BSS architecture of medium to high enterprises, all these applications are tightly integrated with robust middleware application capable of efficient error tracking and resolving mechanisms. These BSS applications are heavily dependent on each other for availability, performance etc, to serve optimally the common business purpose. This tight integration and coupling makes it more difficult to choose the right application be moved in cloud at certain time. In order to consider any BSS application for cloud, one needs to understand the challenges from operations and maintenance perspective, few of which are:
1) Size of databases hosting these applications is very large and usually demands for dedicated and efficient storage. In cloud environment, space that is made available for applications is collected from distributed sources and is shared across different applications, with different customers on the cloud. Dedicated large volume space should be made available on cloud in order to host these applications.
2) In this competitive world, new market opportunities and rollout of new plans in market on the fly is the key to success for marketing team. For an application hosted on cloud, configuring these new plans and making them work from end to end perspective within the given time frame could be a challenge. Application service providers should assure quick time to market features for CSP's growing business needs.
3) Services based integrations could be simple to handle, but point to point interfaces which deal with heavy movement of data between cloud and internal network could be a challenge. These cloud applications are required to be hosted on network which is connected to CSP's internal network with good bandwidth to manage the load efficiently.
4) Application Security is one of the biggest concerns when it comes to exposing the BSS applications and its network to the cloud. All applications that are hosted on the internal network are expected to be communicating efficiently with external applications in a secured manner thru various layers of firewalls. Sufficient security layers should be present between application hosted on cloud and applications on internal network without impacting the application performance.
5) Since an application on cloud is shared between CSP's, it may not always allow customizing the application based on one CSP's business requirements. Some customizations, workflows that are required by one, may impact the application behavior that is not acceptable to others. Applications hosted on cloud should provide flexibility for slight modifications to accommodate the difference in business processes between CSP's, keeping the core process same for all.
6) In most cases, when CIO is defining disaster recovery policy for enterprise applications, he is not in position to define exclusive disaster recovery policy for the applications that are hosted on cloud. This is because hardware is not dedicated and not under his control. Application Service Provider should ensure robust disaster recovery process along with proper business continuity planning so that CIO's can relax and business is not impacted at any point.
7) Performance of application is key essence. BSS applications are OLTP as well as batch oriented which implies that CSR's can change customer specific information at the time when a batch program is processing data for other customers (billing, rating etc). Application Service Providers should ensure consistent performance of hosted application and support CSP's in resolving any such issues that is reported.
8) Availability of Test Cloud environment for such large applications to perform near real time tests is a very remote possibility. Creating the clone or subset of this application and its data at certain point of time for testing can be a challenge. On the other hand, testing cannot be treated as completed by business until they have validated everything working end-to-end. Provision for such type of testing should be made available by Application service providers on clouds to support the CSP's end objective.
All these challenges stated above are more specific to operations. BSS applications are complex and there are many such areas that need more answers and readiness, before these applications can be moved to public cloud. Trends are emerging where IT companies are providing end to end BSS application stack as managed applications to CSP's in form of cloud. Parallel to this, experiments are ongoing for hosting these BSS applications as private clouds in CSP's own network. Although we see instances of private clouds making space in this domain, but still it has to go long to get fully implemented in public cloud. Adaption and implementation of private clouds, is first step towards achieving cloud computing in this domain. Looking into the challenges and open answers, it can be said that "Some clouds has to be cleared, before we see BSS Domain applications on Cloud!!!"
