Cloud Telecom Billing Systems: A Remarkable Facilitator for the Telecom Revenue Management in 2025

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 to retire ISPs, OTT providers and IoT based telcos to move their systems and solutions on the cloud. There are many trusted cloud offerings in the market. Some of these rely Cloud or Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers like 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.

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 spammed automatically to keep the service up and running ensuring the high availability. The cloud environments also support redundant node configurations for smoothing 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 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 the 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 utilized 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-configured clustering 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 for clustering deployment. Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed database service from AWS.

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 several encryption options for data. For example, the AWS 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 and the cloud provider transparently. The stored data is encrypted in a very simple way using the AWS KMS service. Similarly, the cloud platforms provide the TLS 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.

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 of media files by 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.

Pros:

• The data resides in the telecom network and the telecom billing system is low, as the BRM system is deployed on-premises, which means it is hosted on an internal private network.
• This type of deployment serves better where the 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 network and the OCS platform is crucial, otherwise it affects the end user's service. The OCS platform creates an online real time route if the particular usage (calls/data/sms) can continue or if the user has sufficient quota or balance to continue the service.
• The on-premise deployment gives the telecom organisation the freedom and flexibility to use 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 platforms 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 any damages or outages, the off-site hardware components may need to be purchased, requiring budgeting for unforeseen issues with the hardware.
• An on-premise set up requires a dedicated system engineer to take care of updates and upgrades to the OS platforms 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 customized development and work is required for maintaining the platforms and for automation of tasks such as deployments.

Pros:

• Cloud-based telecom billing solutions require less initial cost as there is no investment to be made into the servers and hardware. You can start with a much less cost as you are hiring servers and hardware from the cloud.
• 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 use cost optimising options from the cloud, you can reduce 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 any service. In the telecoms such as the Prepaid Billing Systems, as the anycastdns are made on cloud based servers. These servers are placed securely in the cloud provider's data centers.
• A cloud based deployment primarily requires comprehensive less maintenance costs and engineering effort that is significantly less compared to the on-premise platforms and other supporting software.
• The real benefit of the cloud system is that it comes with built-in services that employ best practices in deployment architecture, make the system load balance, powerful 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 from 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 BRM implementation in your organisation. The cloud based BRM system gives you an advantage of reducing the cost of compliance 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 care of the data protection laws in various countries. This ensures regulatory compliance, taking away the regulatory obligations off your data.

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 billing and roaming scenarios if this delay is significant 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 but 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.

Streamlined Operations

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.

Flexibility and Updates

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 maintenance.

On-Premise to Cloud Feature Mapping

There would need to be a listing down of current deployment features and their parallel counterparts in the cloud world. For example, if perhaps you have a database cluster setup on an on-premise deployment, a similar service would be RDS in the AWS cloud world. So the listing of such similar options, such as an EKS load balancer on the cloud or going with AWS. You may be archiving using with addition of more hardware in an on-premise environment, whereas on cloud you may want to have a look at EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service).

Data Security and Compliance

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 or the S3 buckets.

Integration with Legacy Systems

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.