Migration Challenges in the Telecommunications Industry

In the telecommunications industry, most key transformations require running two systems – legacy stack and new digital stack - simultaneously for a few years before retiring the legacy system. This hybrid state is a critical phase, where switching between systems must occur smoothly to ensure seamless customer service and experience. Migrations are often carried out with the co-existence of the legacy stack while gradually building the capability of the new stack. This approach allows telcos the flexibility to operate new offerings or service-specific customer segments from the new stack while the old stack continues to serve other products or plans. In a scenario where only one or two IT platforms need replacing in an existing end-to-end stack, data migration based on the extract, transform, load (ETL) approach in a big bang manner is suitable, provided technology supports this model. When rolling out a best-of-breed new stack with up to six IT applications, it is advisable to use business migration or lead to cash journey emulation. This ensures data consistency and respects new business processes across the components of the new stack.

Most business migrations operate with certain thumb rules:

Migration must occur with zero disruption to service continuity to avoid churn through port-outs

Tagged with bill cycles, including customer identification and cohort size, to prevent bill shocks caused by changes in bill cycle day or pricing

Ensure periodic customer communication to keep them informed of each key milestone

Bridging the functionality gap between legacy and newly built digital stacks is complex and requires additional planning. This necessitates phased migration based on functionality rollout in the digital stacks

In the case of cloud SaaS applications, the target application platform must be accommodative of the available platform limits

The concurrency limits should consider migration volume, parallel threads, BAU traffic, ongoing operations, and capability baseline

Operational readiness tools can help handle in-flight changes and bulk corrections during migration.

The migration process should include the ability to roll back before the point of no return (PONR) and manually or automatically correct migrated data beyond PONR

Robust operational support and processes are required to handle higher call volumes and issues reported by customers post-migration, ensuring stability and scalability of the target platform

The migration must have minimal impact on customer service and, consequently, the net promoter score (NPS)

For complex telco cloud migrations involving millions of accounts and services, performing migration in batches is most suitable. A big bang approach would result in lengthier outages, impacting users and BAU transactions

Full stack migrations in telecom pose multi-fold challenges as the cutover to the target stack billing, network, and charging systems must happen seamlessly along with the CRM migration

It is essential to evaluate the infrastructure and scalability of all cloud and on-premises systems involved in the provisioning journey to determine the most feasible throughput and bottlenecks while migrating larger volumes via cloud-to-cloud interfaces