Laura Hyde |
New features have been released for Azure Operator Nexus, Microsoft’s hybrid cloud platform for telecommunications firms, as it also becomes generally available following a period of public preview.
“Earlier this year at MWC Barcelona, Microsoft announced the public preview of Azure Operator Nexus built to empower telecom operators to modernise and transform their networks,” said Yousef Khalidi, corporate vice president, Azure for Operators. “Operator Nexus enables operators to use cloud technology to modernise and monetise their network investments, lowering total cost of ownership, driving operational efficiency and resiliency with advanced AI and automation, and improving the security of highly distributed, software-based networks.”
Operator Nexus was released for public preview at MWC 2023 in Barcelona
The full release of Operator Nexus includes several new features: Network Fabric Automation, to help build and operate networks, Network Packet Broker, for traffic monitoring, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), to improve resilience and manage performance, and Azure Lockbox, for data access.
These and other new features are explained in more detail in a blog post by Khalidi on the Microsoft website. “We hope the addition of these new features will enable organisations to maintain the optimal performance and security of their networks,” said Khalidi. “For future releases we hope to build upon the experience of running Operator Nexus for a fully deployed, tier 1 operator network. We’re looking forward to continuing to expand the Operator Nexus Ready ecosystem to include additional network function providers and AIOps functionality, integrating the power of Generative AI to improve how networks are designed, deployed, and operated.”
US telco AT&T is working closely with Microsoft on deployment of the platform. “Operator Nexus general availability is an important milestone in our journey with Microsoft,” said Igal Elbaz, senior vice president at AT&T. “We are excited to see our vision of telco grade cloud powered by Microsoft Azure and AI technologies deployed in AT&T data centres and operated by AT&T.”
Several other partners, including Nokia, Amdocs, Ericsson and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, have also been collaborating with Microsoft for Operator Nexus-based solutions.