Organizations today increasingly operate in multi-cloud and hybrid environments, using a combination of public and private clouds and edge computing to manage their technology assets.
As the experience of telecommunications giant Nokia shows, this creates opportunities and challenges for enterprises to serve their customers. The Finnish company recently began using Microsoft Azure Arc, a platform for managing and multi-cloud environments, taking a key step in its quest to serve customers in the new environment.
The journey to Azure Arc began in 2016, when Nokia launched its Analytics, Virtualization and Automation (AVA) system, an artificial intelligence-based analytics platform. The company developed the system to help its customers — cellular carriers — use data to improve operational efficiency, increase revenue and provide a better user experience for their customers. Until then, Nokia engineers had been inputting data into spreadsheets and using manual data processing techniques for analytics. This approach was inefficient, error-prone and unsuitable for processing large amounts of data.
“Given the significant increase in performance and network size, that path was no longer acceptable,” says Paolo Tornaghi, who heads the technology and architecture group in Nokia’s advanced business applications services division. – We needed scalable applications for customers.”
The AVA system uses data from network operations and other sources to draw inferences from artificial intelligence and find solutions to workflow problems. In 2019, Nokia moved AVA to the cloud. The move to Azure gave Nokia the ability to offer AI-powered analytics through AVA to customers around the world without having to manage separate cloud services.
Using the cloud provided immediate benefits, but as Nokia began to scale AVA, new needs arose. For some customers, specific regulatory requirements suggested the need to store data internally, while other customers wanted to use AVA in other public or private clouds rather than the Nokia cloud.
Azure Arc allows users to manage distributed environments in on-premises, edge and multi-cloud environments.
Developing customized solutions for individual customers wasn’t feasible, and Nokia needed to find a way to deploy its AVA services in a unified way across any Kubernetes builds that customers were using.
“That became a problem for us. We couldn’t offer AVA to our customers who had those limitations. We had to do something about it,” says Kalyanjit Gogoi, head of research and development for Nokia’s advanced business application services. – That’s a problem we put to Microsoft and asked, “How do we deal with it?” It’s a very close partnership. We develop many of our solutions together.”
Microsoft’s engineering team worked closely with Nokia to integrate Azure Arc with AVA and develop the flexible, scalable infrastructure management solution customers need. Azure Arc, launched in 2019, enables resource design in Azure and centralizes the management of the company’s multi-cloud and on-premises technologies, from data centers to peripherals. For Nokia, the implementation of Azure Arc means that the company can manage and control AVA applications that run on customer-preferred cloud services while complying with data requirements in different countries. Sensitive data stays in the customer’s cloud and is not transferred anywhere.
The new Azure Arc-enabled AVA architecture consists of two parts: the Nokia-owned Azure subscription cloud, where AVA applications and tasks are concentrated, and the Kubernetes stack-enabled client cloud, on which Nokia deploys and supports its AVA applications. The two clouds communicate over a secure channel.