Page 3 - Cloud computing: From paradigm to operation

Foreword

Cloud services provide on-demand access to ITU standards are supporting industry in
advanced ICT resources, enabling innovators to navigating this transformation. This compendium
gain new capabilities without investing in new of ITU cloud standards will provide ICT industry
hardware or software. Cloud concepts are also players with a valuable point of reference as they
fundamental to the evolution of ICT networking, transform networking operations to take full
helping networks to meet the requirements of an advantage of cloud capabilities.
increasingly diverse range of ICT applications.

As innovation accelerates in fields such as IMT-
2020/5G and the Internet of Things and digital
transformation takes hold in every industry sector,
the cloud ecosystem will continue to grow in
importance to companies large and small, in
developing as well as developed countries.
ITU standards provide the requirements and
functional architectures of the cloud ecosystem,
covering inter- and intra-cloud computing and
technologies supporting ‘XaaS’ (X as a Service).

These standards enable consistent end-to-end,
multi-cloud management and the monitoring of
services across different service providers’
domains and technologies – they were developed
in view of the convergence of telecoms and
computing technologies that characterizes the
cloud ecosystem.
Recent years have seen software coming to play a
key role in network management and

orchestration. Concepts rooted in datacentre
networking are transforming telecoms operations, Chaesub Lee
with notable examples found in software-defined Director
networking and network function virtualization. ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau

This convergence of telecoms and computing
technology is in full flight, with our networks
coming to depend heavily on cloud and very
modern computing, transport and datacentre
technologies.
Our networks are transforming to become agile
all-round players able to perform a wide array of
specialized functions. Cloud is central to this
agility, enabling the automated provisioning of
virtualized resources to meet the needs of any ICT
application.

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