Why 5G will turbo-boost your journey to cloud native

The Situation: 5G has been in the news for several years, and it’s time for CTOs to engage with their technical service partners and telecommunications providers to gauge the effect of 5G technology on their cloud strategies. Failing to appreciate 5G will result in failed aspirational improvements in process automation, AI, security, IoT, and analytics. However, firms that promptly focus on how 5G amplifies their hybrid-cloud strategies will likely eat their competitors for lunch.

5G is 10 times faster than 4G—it’s time to stop worrying about cables and switches and focus on real-time connections everywhere to everything

Communications carriers promise that 5G will be 10 times faster than 4G, and we expect the amount of data collected, shared, analyzed, and communicated and the number of relevant new applications, AI, and workload capabilities to explode. Initially, 5G will be deployed riding on the back of 4G network technologies, and the speed will only be roughly 1.5x 4G’s speed. When standalone 5G is implemented later in 2022, speeds will increase significantly. 5G will provide data transmission speeds nearly equal to what we expect from wired networks, and they may outperform many Wi-Fi networks.

5G will be the backbone of service delivery to customers and partners. Its speed and bandwidth will allow a near-infinite number of connected devices to collect, transmit, analyze, and provide information to users and other autonomous devices. In addition, laptops, cars, and billions of sensors will use 5G in place of any other transmission media to stay connected, secured, and up to date.

Enterprise relationships with service providers and telecommunication firms are about to change forever

CTOs must prepare themselves for new relationships across a growing ecosystem of partnerships. Their software-as-a-service (SaaS) partners, service partners, and telecommunications providers will need to work in lockstep to reap the rewards of 5G.

Integrating 5G networks into an enterprise hybrid-cloud strategy requires architects to work alongside applications teams, network design teams, and partners to evolve thinking on delivering services via the cloud. In addition, they’ll need input from the software development team on orchestrating the growing number of microservices-based and serverless applications, quality management, and gateway connections. Together, they’ll work to seamlessly bring data, applications, and workload services from wired to wireless to cellular networks.

Telecommunications providers will have a role in services delivery, but that’s not the only role. They’re poised for a crucial role in orchestration, management, and network provision. As enterprises rely more on SaaS, microservices, and edge computing to become more agile in delivering data and workloads across endpoints and users, a CTO’s team must think about hybrid cloud relying on deep 5G integrations across gateways and transmission nodes. Poor planning by the enterprise and its services partners will impact latency, security, and resiliency.

Private and hybrid-cloud 5G is exciting and promises new revenue opportunities for the bold, but it is woefully undervalued as a change agent

Removing the need to run a cable is only the first step. A network of 5G connections between manufacturers, retailers, and cities with computing devices, users, and IoT will be the fabric of the future. However, CTOs have focused on below-the-line technology improvements through process automation, AI, and analytics, ignoring the backbone that will allow this to happen.

In a recent HFS Pulse study illustrated in Exhibit 1, 600 business and technology decision makers ranked 5G second to last in a list of emerging technology targets for investment. A lack of appreciation for 5G and its role will be detrimental to adopting other emerging technology.

Exhibit 1: Decision makers don’t understand the impact 5G is about to have on their business

Note: Data less than 3% is not shown in the chart
Sample set: 600 executives across Global 2000 enterprises
Source: HFS Pulse, H2 2021

IBM, Tech Mahindra, and Infosys are 5G implementation leaders

5G isn’t an in-house skill for most enterprises, but remaining ignorant is just foolish. Instead, look to your service providers to augment your understanding, skills, and planning on how 5G impacts your current cloud strategies.

Several service providers have 5G capabilities. IBM, Tech Mahindra, and Infosys are developing COEs, partnerships, and application and network design capabilities to benefit an enterprise’s need to understand 5G; for example

• With its recent acquisition of Sentaca, IBM is poised to help its customers boost their cloud capabilities by bringing additional 5G context to DevSecOps efforts. IBM has aligned its application modernization development orchestration (with Boxboat and Red Hat’s Open Shift and Ansible) with skills for telecommunication-centric design that includes cellular gateway handoff, quality control, and connection optimization. Look for IBM to offer customers and prospects 5G-specific Garage offerings and CloudPaks in the next six months.
• Tech Mahindra has a long history with many telecommunications operators. It uses these partnerships and domain knowledge to bring pre-packaged capabilities to its enterprise customers. By providing context for 5G with industry innovations and use cases such as IoT in utilities and data from autonomous vehicles, the company simplifies learning about 5G’s growing business opportunities.
• With partnerships with firms like Cisco, Infosys is pushing hard with business-oriented messaging on software-defined networking and 5G. With a focus on the growing needs of corralling data and developing applications, Infosys is building partnerships with software, networking, and telecom vendors.

The Bottom Line: 5G won’t take care of itself; it must be part of your firm’s applications, data, and network architecture plans.

Your customers and partners will judge you on how securely, efficiently, and cost-effectively they can connect to your relevant systems and complete transactions. While many consider 5G in the purview of telecommunications providers, the ability to create hybrid networks to support users, devices, and IoT will impact your process automation, AI, cloud, security, and analytics efforts.