OSS / BSS security getting a little cloudy

Many systems are moving beyond simple virtualization and are being run on dynamic private or even public clouds. CSPs will migrate many to hybrid clouds because of concerns about data security and regulations on where data are stored and processed.
We believe that over the next 15 years, nearly all software systems will migrate to clouds provided by third parties and be whatever cloud native becomes when it matures. They will incorporate many open-source tools and middleware packages, and may include some major open-source platforms or sub-systems (for example, the size of OpenStack or ONAP today)
.”
Dr Mark H Mortensen
in an article entitled, “BSS and OSS are moving to the cloud: Analysys Mason” on Telecom Asia.

Dr Mortensen raises a number of other points relating to cloud models for OSS and BSS in the article linked above. Included is definition of various cloud / virtualisation related terms.

He also rightly points out that many OSS / BSS vendors are seeking to move to virtualised / cloud / as-a-Service delivery models (for reasons including maintainability, scalability, repeatability and other “ilities”).

The part that I find interesting with cloud models (I’ll use the term generically) is positioning of the security control point(s). Let’s start by assuming a scenario where:

  1. The Active Network (AN) is “on-net” – the network that carries live customer traffic (the routers, switches, muxes, etc) is managed by the CSP / operator [Noting though, that these too are possibly managed as virtual entities rather than owned].
  2. The “cloud” OSS/BSS is “off-net” – some vendors will insist on their multi-tenanted OSS/BSS existing within the public cloud

The diagram below shows three separate realms:

  1. The OSS/BSS “in the cloud”
  2. The operator’s enterprise / DC realm
  3. The operator’s active network realm

as well as the Security Control Points (SCPs) between them.

OSS BSS Cloud Security Control Points

The most important consideration of this architecture is that the Active Network remains operational (ie carry customer traffic) even if the link to the DC and/or the link to the cloud is lost.

With that in mind, our second consideration is what aspects of network management need to reside within the AN realm. It’s not just the Active Network devices, but anything else that allows the AN to operate in an isolated state. This means that shared services like NTP / synch needs a presence in the AN realm (even if not of the highest stratum within the operator’s time-synch solution).

What about Element Managers (EMS) that look after the AN devices? How about collectors / probes? How about telemetry data stores? How about network health management tools like alarm and performance management? How about user access management (LDAP, AD, IAM, etc)? Do they exist in the AN or DC realm?

Then if we step up the stack a little to what I refer to as East-West OSS / BSS tools like ticket management, workforce management, even inventory management – do we collect, process, store and manage these within the DC or are we prepared to shift any of this functionality / data out to the cloud? Or do we prefer it to remain in the AN realm and ensure only AN privileged users have access?

Which OSS / BSS tools remain on-net (perhaps as private cloud) and which can (or must) be managed off-net (public cloud)?

Climb further up the stack and we get into the interesting part of cloud offerings. Not only do we potentially have the OSS/BSS (including East-West tools), but more excitingly, we could bring in services or solutions like content from external providers and bundle them with our own offerings.

We often hear about the tight security that’s expected (and offered) as part of the vendor OSS/BSS cloud solutions, but as you see, the tougher consideration for network management architects is actually the end-to-end security and where to position the security control points relative to all the pieces of the OSS/BSS stack.

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