Cloud billing systems have arrived and are making an impact in the telecom world and associated domains. They are systems that help in rating, charging, invoicing, collection and end to end tracking of revenue for telecom companies.

There is a growing trend in telcos, ISPs, OTT providers and IoT based solutions to move their systems and solutions on the cloud. There are many trusted cloud offerings in the market. Some of these key Cloud or Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers are AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Of course, there are many more medium to small scale providers and they also cater to region specific or country specific requirements.

However, for telcos who are looking for their presence globally, the named three are more relevant because of their reach in various countries and geographies.

There are country specific data protection laws that most of these cloud providers meet and this helps telcos immensely as they can outsource the regulatory compliance requirements to the cloud provider. The compliance requirements are specific to a region or a country, such as the GDPR which is a compliance standard relevant to the European Union. A telco operating in the European Union can use a cloud provider that meets the GDPR compliance and not worry about the data protection laws in the EU. Instead, they can focus on running their own business and operations. The BRM system providers enhance their offerings by blending and augmenting their telecom billing solutions with the cloud features.

A cloud-based telecom billing system is a BRM system (Billing & Revenue Management System) which is hosted in the cloud environment, and integrates with the cloud services enhancing its capabilities with features like security, clustering, load balancing, high availability, and dynamic scaling. These cloud-enabled features ensure efficient performance, reliability, and flexibility for managing telecom billing and revenue operations.

The SaaS telecom billing systems are available to use from the cloud and often made available on a subscription basis, or on some kind of annual licensing arrangements. Some SaaS telecom billing systems are true SaaS systems, in the sense that they have multiple tenants using the same instance of the BRM system, however within that instance they have their own protected perimeter in which they are operating. A multi-tenant SaaS telecom billing system comes with several constraints and restrictions such as the amount of revenue processed, or the volume of transactions processed by your organisation within that instance.

There is a bit of a difference between a SaaS Telecom Billing System and a Cloud Telecom Billing system. It has to do with the nature of the business being a small scale business or a mid-scale/big-enterprise scale. The small scale companies can operate on SaaS models whereas the large enterprise requirements are served by a dedicated instance of an enterprise billing system hosted on Cloud. Visit EarnBill’s SaaS and Enterprise offerings here.

SaaS billing systems host multiple clients but none of those clients are aware of the presence of other clients as their data is protected and hidden from other clients. They operate and use the SaaS billing system as if it’s a dedicated instance for them, however in the background the system is using the system as a shared system across multiple clients. A cloud billing system refers to an enterprise deployment on the cloud for a mid scale or a large scale enterprise. It does not involve a shared instance of the deployment, it is a dedicated instance specific to that organisation.

As explained earlier, the cloud telecom billing systems are billing and revenue management solutions (or BRM systems) that are blended with or augmented by using the technology and features provided by the cloud platform such as the AWS, Azure or Google cloud. The Cloud-based telecom billing solutions exhibit the following key features:

• Security – Security and compliance are key reasons why telecom providers are moving to cloud billing. Cloud platforms such as AWS come with many built-in services and features to enhance the security of the BRM system deployment.

• Load Balancing – The cloud environments offer services that offer load balancing based on various algorithms such as round robin or using the most lightly loaded service to handle the incoming requests. Typically, the load balancer such as the Amazon Load Balancer (which is used in AWS cloud) allows configurable options to evenly distribute the load amongst multiple instances of the same service. The load balancing configuration can be an active-active mode for the services or an active-passive mode.

• High Availability – For deploying micro-services from the BRM platform, a Kubernetes based deployment is made easy in the cloud. For example, EKS (or Elastic Kubernetes Service) is used in AWS. This service provides high availability and automated dynamic scaling. If any service deployed in the Kubernetes cluster goes down, the EKS service ensures that the service instance is spawned automatically to keep the service up and running ensuring the high availability. The cloud environments also support redundant node configurations for monolithic software deployments, ensuring high availability.

• Dynamic Scaling – The cloud platforms support Kubernetes service which helps with dynamic scaling. Apart from this, each cloud platform supports different services that help with dynamically scaling the resources on the cloud environment up or down depending on the load requirements. For example, in AWS, a configuration can ensure that when the CPU load on all existing EC2 instances crosses 80%, then the system will automatically instantiate another application instance on a new EC2 node, thus shouldering additional processing load.

• System Updates and Upgrades – The cloud based billing solution makes it easier to maintain and update the underlying OS platform. Linux is typically the most utilised OS platform for BRM system deployments with distributions such as Redhat or Ubuntu being used more extensively. The cloud platforms provide easy options to update and upgrade the system periodically. 

• Alerting & Monitoring Services – The cloud systems provide easy to configure monitoring and alerting options. Monitoring is performed for various cloud based services, application deployments and the system performance, and then alerts could be triggered for specific events. Amazon Cloudwatch is one example of the Alerting and Monitoring service.

• Database Service with Clustering – Setting up a database cluster on an on-premise environment is a very complex task and it involves a lot of expertise to set up, fine tune and maintain this setup. The cloud platforms come with database services with pre-installed clusters, covering multi-region support. This makes it easy to set up the databases for large complex deployments. The cloud platform manages the database clustering under the hood and provides an easy interface to fine tune the clustering deployment. Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed database service from AWS.

• SFTP Service – Setting up an SFTP folder with security and access is quite cumbersome on a server. However, in a cloud environment the SFTP service makes it very easy to install and configure SFTP folders and control their access.

• SMTP Service – An email server with good throughput and trusted sources or IPs makes it convenient to set up SMTP service. The SMTP services from cloud are more reliable and greatly reduce chances of your service being blocked for SPAM messages. One example of an SMTP service from the cloud is the Amazon SES (Simple Email Service). It is a service which is convenient to configure and achieves good email delivery throughput.

• Disaster Recovery (DR) Options – A cloud platform allows the telecom companies to deploy a DR environment in a different region or a city within the same country. If the data centers of the cloud platform based in one particular city go down due to a natural calamity or city wide power outage, then the system can still function from the redundant environment kept ready in passive mode in another region. 

• Data Storage – The cloud platforms provide data storage services that are useful to store large volumes of data. AWS file system services like the Elastic File System (EFS) and the S3 buckets are widely used for data storage and backups. EFS is a scalable storage service which can be incorporated to store data for more dynamic storage such as for exporting of reports and file handoffs from the BRM system. S3 buckets are cheaper storage options that can be used to store archived data for long periods of time without costing too much.

• Data Protection – One of the key concerns for hosting the BRM system on a cloud environment is ensuring that the data for the telecom company is protected. The cloud environment provides various encryption options for data. For example, the RDS service in the Amazon cloud ensures data is encrypted at rest in the database. The working of this encryption and decryption uses the underlying database capabilities, but the set up and the configuration is very simple in the cloud based service. Similarly, the cloud platforms provide the certificates for ensuring that connectivity to the database service is done securely and data flows from application to the database and vice versa in an encrypted format.

Having covered various features of the cloud billing platforms, let us explore the comparison of the two hosting options for a BRM system, namely a cloud billing solution Vs the traditional telecom billing solution (or the on-premise BRM solution). Here is a run-down of a set of points listing the pros and cons of both the deployment options:

Pros:

• • The latency between the telecom network and the telecom billing system is low, as the BRM system is deployed on-premise, which means it is hosted on an internal private network.
  • This type of deployment is useful for systems where internet speeds are not as good in the country or the region and result in higher network latency, especially in systems such as the Prepaid Billing Systems. The Prepaid Billing relies on an Online Charging System (OCS) to rate and charge the usage. In an OCS system, the quality of connectivity and network speed between the telecom network and the OCS platform is crucial, otherwise it affects the end user’s service. The OCS platform checks in online real time mode if the particular usage (calls/data/sms) can continue and if the user has sufficient quota or balance to continue the service.
  • The data is hosted within the organisation’s private premises and network and not moving outside the protected perimeter.
  • The on-premise set up requires a less recurring cost when compared with a cloud platform.
  • The on-premise deployment of the billing solution gives a lot of flexibility on the choice of software, tools and platform that an organisation wants to use.

Cons:

• • An on premise set up of servers and hardware requires more initial cost.
  • The maintenance of servers and hardware does add a recurring component to the cost, reducing the advantage over the cloud based systems that have ongoing recurring rental costs.
  • In case of damages, fire or simply repair challenges, more costly hardware components may need to be purchased, requiring budgeting for unforeseen issues with the hardware.
  • An on-premise set up requires a dedicated sysadmin engineer to take care of updates and upgrade to the OS platform and other hosted software and tools.
  • The ownership of physical and network security falls squarely on the organisation which is hosting such a platform.
  • The cost related to compliance such as GDPR, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 increases for an on premise setup.
  • More customised development and work is required for maintaining the platform and for automation of tasks such as deployments.

Cloud Billing

Pros:

• • Cloud-based telecom billing solutions require less initial cost as there is no investment to be made into the servers and hardware. You simply subscribe to a cloud based service and deploy your BRM solution on the cloud environment.
  • There is a recurring cost involved with the cloud systems because as a company you are paying a rental on a monthly basis to use the services, however, there are many options given by the cloud to reduce these costs. For example, if you commit to using a certain resource upfront for one year, then costs go down quite a bit. Similarly, if you use cost optimising options from the cloud, you can achieve a reasonable amount of saving in the costs.
  • Using cloud billing is a good option in countries or geographies where the internet speeds are good. With good internet speed, the latency between the telecom network and the cloud environment is minimal and does not affect the response time of the OCS systems.
  • There is no responsibility on you as a company for the physical security of your systems as the deployments are made on cloud based servers. These servers are placed securely in the cloud provider’s data centers.
  • A cloud based deployment and platform requires comparatively less maintenance costs and easier to update and upgrade the OS platform and other supporting software.
  • The real benefit of the cloud platform is that it comes with built-in services that employ best practices in deployment architecture, make the systems more scalable, robust and easy to configure and use by the engineers. You do not need to set up complex services such as a database cluster on your own. You can instead use an existing managed database service like the Amazon RDS (which is provided by the AWS cloud).
  • The cloud environments come with built-in compliance support for standards such as the GDPR, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II, all of which are crucial for the ISMS implementation in your organisation. The cloud based BRM system gives you an edge over your competition by securing your data, and ensuring implementation of secured services such as automated collection of payments using credit cards and bank accounts.
  • The cloud billing systems take due care of the data protection laws in various countries. This ensures regulatory compliance, taking away the regulatory obligations off your plate.

Cons:

• • In countries or geographies where the internet speeds are not that good, using cloud billing can lead to more latency between the telecom networking and the cloud billing environment. This can affect the account balance check validation process in the prepaid scenarios and lead to service being affected for users. A cloud billing environment is not recommended for slow internet speeds. However, there are less and less countries now where internet speeds are slow. Therefore, this disadvantage is shrinking and applicable only to specific regions in the world.
  •  In certain cases, the organisation may not want to store the data on the cloud environment, mainly due to the nature of business involved. In such cases, the traditional telecom billing option is more suitable with an on-premise deployment.
  • A cloud billing solution can start becoming expensive due to the recurring cost, if the deployment, the scaling, and the growth of the data is not managed optimally.

We have covered the comparison of Cloud-based vs. On-premise Telecom Billing above with pros and cons of both the deployment options. It is not like there is no space left for the traditional telecom billing with on-premise deployment. There are business cases, specifically due to data related concerns or due to slow internet speeds, where companies opt for an on-premise deployment of their telecom billing solution.

The space for the cloud billing solutions is growing with an edge over the on-premise billing in terms of cost, scalability and efficiency of the solution.

The cloud-based telecom billing solutions can reduce the running costs by optimising the services used in the cloud platform, reducing the stored data to a minimum and carrying out cost optimisation initiatives. In fact, the platforms such as the AWS provide alerting mechanisms that give you a notification if a certain service starts becoming more expensive crossing a threshold that you define for daily, weekly or monthly levels.

The cloud-based telecom billing solutions enhance their features using the underlying cloud platform’s various managed services. These managed services from the cloud platform make use of the best practices in deployment and architecture. Therefore, the  billing solution avoids many technical glitches, errors or issues that can creep in into the system due to mis-configuration of complex services such as database clusters, network security groups, WAFs and more.

The telecom providers are moving to cloud billing for the following key reasons:

1. Scalability – The cloud-based telecom billing solutions provide scalability required for large, enterprise scale deployments more easily. The services used for scaling such as clustering, load balancing, dynamic scaling etc are more hardened and tested than your custom on-premise setups.

The traditional on-premise setups rely on scaling features implemented by the engineers, their level of expertise and most likely these solutions will evolve with time and will be very customised for your setups. It may be hard to scale these solutions for your business requirements, especially if there is an upsurge in volumes due to growing business. Compare this with the cloud billing solution, where the underlying scaling features are continuously being upgraded from the cloud provider making them future ready and more sustainable for your growing needs.

2. Cost Efficiency – The cloud billing environments definitely become much more cost efficient in the longer run, as you start saving time in recurring maintenance of hardware and system engineer fees. The on premise environments require more vigil and care from the system engineering team and therefore more longer term costs. The cloud environments also suggest cost optimisation options looking at your deployments, which further guides your team to run your deployments more efficiently.

3. Enhanced Customer Experience – A cloud-based environment provides a more robust yet more flexible system, the one that will ensure billing accuracy and efficient day-to-day billing operations. It is like ensuring all the trains are running on time. Similarly, all the billing, mediation and collection jobs run more efficiently with features like dynamic scaling, they are monitored properly and this leads to better end-customer experience. This further leads to more trust and more business.

There are several benefits of cloud billing solutions or SaaS telecom billing for providers. These are covered in the cloud billing pros section above. However, here we cover how streamlined operations and flexibility of updates and upgrades benefit the telecom service providers immensely in the long run.

With a cloud based environment, the day-to-day operations get streamlined more easily. The cloud features are more hardened over a period of time and offer your solution options that make it very easy and convenient to operate the system. For example, it is easier to apply dynamic scaling features to your daily jobs that process huge volumes of data. This ensures that you achieve maximum data processing at the most optimum cost and streamline your operations.

Your system engineers get alerted for security updates, vulnerabilities with the recommendation of action that needs to be taken. There is sometimes an underlying upgrade of the platform done to carry out the hardware maintenance. The automated updates and upgrades are scheduled and informed to you by the cloud platform in advance. This gives you a lot of flexibility and your team can focus on taking your solution and your platform ahead, instead of getting bogged down by routine maintenance.

For telecom service providers planning a transition from on-premise deployments to cloud-based telecom billing solutions, careful planning and execution needs to be carried out. It would be a major migration project that would need to take into account various aspects of the system. You would need to consider feature mapping for features like high availability and scaling, data security, compliance and integrations with various systems.

There would need to be a listing down of current deployment features and their parallel counterparts in the cloud world. For example, if a system has a database cluster in an on-premise deployment, a similar service would be RDS in the AWS. If you were using nginx for load balancing in an on-premise environment, you may consider using Amazon Load Balancer on the cloud (if going with AWS). You may be achieving scaling with addition of more hardware in an on-premise deployment, whereas on cloud you may want to have a look at EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service).

You may be following a certain set of compliance standards and some processes of data protection and security. You would need a review of these processes, how the security and compliance is being achieved from the on-premise environment, then consider how the process would change for similar controls to be implemented on cloud. For example, you may be taking database dumps on a weekly basis from an automated script in your on-premise environment. On AWS cloud, you may replace this backup process with RDS snapshots feature which are stored automatically in a secure perimeter on the S3 buckets.

A proper and detailed study of all the existing integrations needs to be carried out and documented (if not done already). Each integration needs to be moved into the cloud environment and various aspects such as network access, network latency etc need to be considered and options evaluated. 

A cloud-based telecom billing solution is armed with more modern features, whether it is dynamic scaling, security, platform updates, high availability, disaster recovery or data backups. This augurs well for the telecom companies as they can reap the benefits of the most optimal solutions hosted on the cloud.

In Cloud Billing, the infrastructural features are available as a service (IaaS), allowing you to use the most optimal  infrastructural solutions that have been tested and hardened. Your solution then uses the best in class infrastructural services, this allows you to focus more on your business and its growth.

EarnBill supports deployments that work well in traditional telecom billing (or on-premise) setups as well as in the cloud billing setups. EarnBill’s various data processing  jobs and transactional processing capabilities have been enhanced and augmented by using cloud features such as high availability, dynamic scaling, disaster recovery, system security, data protection, database backups, data archival, data purging, and more. Contact us to know more about EarnBill Cloud-based telecom billing solutions.