This report analyses the positioning of each of the three hyperscalers – AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure – in the telco vertical (outside of China). We assess how successful they have been at convincing telcos to migrate their business to the public cloud.

A deep dive into the ‘big three’ hyperscale cloud providers in the telco realm

This report assesses the positioning of the three largest US-based hyperscalers in the telco vertical: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure (and we will refer to them in this report as the ‘big three’). It focuses on the world outside of China where the Chinese cloud providers dominate and the ‘big three’ have no business. While we recognise that there are other notable cloud providers, multinational (e.g.: Oracle, IBM) or specific national players (e.g. OVH in France), we have chosen to deep dive on the ‘big three’ to contain the scope of this report.

Hyperscalers offer managed cloud services to telcos, as they do to any enterprises in other verticals. This means that operators can run their workloads using the hyperscalers’ cloud software platform on servers that are located:

• Either in the hyperscalers’ data centres/facilities. In this case, the telco does not have to maintain any cloud infrastructure for that particular workload and gets it, often as-a-service, from the hyperscaler;
• Or in the telco’s own facilities, i.e. using on-prem servers. These can be servers that the telco owns completely or they could be leased, including from the hyperscalers, also often on an as-a-service basis.

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While this type of migration has been relatively successful for IT and IT-like workloads, the move from private to public cloud has been slow for certain so-called mission-critical workloads, due to the specific requirements of those workloads.

This report, based on desk research and interviews, assesses the varying degrees of maturity by which workloads have migrated or are migrating to the public cloud.

We assess the migration of eight telco workload types to the hyperscalers’ respective clouds

Table of contents

• Executive Summary
• Introduction
  • Regulations and the sovereign cloud
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Google Cloud
• Microsoft Azure
• Conclusion

Related research

• Telco Cloud Deployment Tracker Q2 2024: Is AWS winning in hyperscale telco cloud?
• Vendor-hyperscaler partnerships: Building the multi-cloud native future?
• Inside the cloud-native telco
• Finding value from AI, analytics and automation (A3) in the telco network

Emma Buckland

Emma Buckland

Principal Analyst

Emma has worked in the TMT sector since the end of the 1990s, first at operators in France and the UK and later as a consultant and analyst. In her day to day job at STL Partners, she gets involved in quantitative analysis and is part of our telco cloud practice. Since 2022, she has been the lead analyst of the Telco cloud insights service and is a frequent contributor to its tools and reports, including on open RAN and cloud-native transformation. Emma holds an MSc. Engineering from Ecole Centrale de Lyon.