There’s an upward trend in businesses’ need for cloud services, IoT (Internet of Things), network virtualization and automation, and advanced network management, and this is driving the NFV (network function virtualization) market. In fact, research from MarketsandMarkets suggests the global NFV market will expand to $36.3 billion by 2024, with major market driving factors including the growing need for advanced network management systems to handle the increasing network traffic and complexities. In another research study from Meticulous Market Research, which forecasts even farther out, the data suggests the NFV market will reach $122 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 34.9% between 2020 and 2027.
To help this rising market, Broadband Forum has released the latest version of its OB-BAA (Open Broadband—Broadband Access Abstraction) open-source project, which the nonprofit calls a “major cloud-native network cost breakthrough” for global operators. Release 5.0 of Broadband Forum’s OB-BAA open-source project accomplishes several things. First, the nonprofit says it provides tools operators can use to plan and build cloud-native networks and deliver faster services to their customers. The latest release also helps operators offer a seamless customer experience via policy-based authentication within the operator’s cloud network that can identify and authenticate ONUs (optical network units) that exist in an end-user’s home or office.
Release 5.0 also enhances the functionality for disaggregating the management of ONUs from the OLT (optical line termination) into the operator’s network and includes new features to handle ONU alarms. Thanks to the disaggregation of the ONU function embedded within the OLT, Broadband Forum says its latest release will result in significant cost savings for operators during the process of onboarding and deploying new ONU brands and models. It also reduces complexity around migrating existing access networks to cloud native SDN (software-defined networking) automated networks.
The global SDN market is also growing thanks to the increasing size and complexity of network infrastructures, which MarketsandMarkets reports has boosted demand to simplify and efficiently manage the entire network. The research firm says as a result, the SDN market is expected to grow from $13.7 billion in 2020 to $32.7 billion by 2025. Besides helping to simplify network management, benefits of SDN tend to include lower operational costs and more granular security, according to Wipro. SDN and NFV both leverage network abstraction and can result in more flexible networking architectures.
Flexibility and agility are the name of the game for enterprises in today’s connected world, and the COVID-19 pandemic has proved this is the case in numerous verticals and situations by forcing companies to be flexible and agile or die trying. The cloud native approach to building and running applications fully exploits the advantages of the cloud model, which can include flexibility and agility, says Cisco, and Broadband Forum’s latest release is paving the way for cloud-native networks to bring the most value possible to not only operators but also their customers.
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