As Luxembourg’s largest national telecom service provider, Post Luxembourg serves the digital communications needs of both residential and business customers. In fall 2020, Post will be launching commercial 5G service and continues to see rising demand for mobile, cloud, video, and business-to-business services. To meet this demand, Post has deployed Juniper switching across its state-of-the-art data centres and leverages Contrail Enterprise Multicloud to ensure that the new services can be deployed rapidly and securely through its expansive infrastructure.
Mobile and Internet usage grows every year. Between 2019 and 2020, the number of mobile connections in Luxembourg increased by 2.8 per cent, and they now reach 134 per cent of the population. Similarly, Internet subscriptions have increased by 1.5 per cent over the same period, while Internet adoption has reached 97 per cent.
As the country’s largest telecom provider, Post is everyone’s biggest competitor. This means it has to constantly be at the top of its game as a leader in information and communication technology (ICT), especially when it comes to the launch of 5G services. Post engaged with Nomios Germany to advise on the right path forward to ensure that new services can be deployed rapidly and securely through its expansive infrastructure.
About Post Luxembourg
The Post Luxembourg Group has a well-established reputation and is firmly rooted in Luxembourg. It is also an innovative company that adopts an open-minded approach to the world thanks to its constantly evolving activities and the diversity of its staff, who represent more than 27 different nationalities. The Group is active in three main sectors of activity: Financial Services, Telecom/ICT and Post & Logistics.
As Luxembourg’s largest national telecom service provider, Post Luxembourg serves the digital communications needs of both residential and business customers. In fall 2020, Post will be launching commercial 5G service and continues to see rising demand for mobile, cloud, video, and business-to-business services.
Digital transformation needs
5G is much more than just a new technology or revolution for smartphones and video-on-demand. The role that mobile technology plays in society will be transformed fundamentally by 5G. With the continuous growing demand for connectivity, 5G stands for the opportunity to create a purpose-built agile network, tailored to the specific needs of citizens and the economy. Beyond these transformative opportunities of 5G, business and residential customers continue to consume more digital services.
“Customer requirements are driven by a set of needs, and digital transformation is driving customer experience,” says Akim Ziadi, in charge of ICT infrastructure at Post Luxembourg. “We built an agile and performant infrastructure to support this digitalization with 5G, intent-driven networking, and security services into our product offerings.”
Post Luxembourg previously engaged with Nomios Germany, already having provided Post with its base for their network in 2014. With a high technological experience and knowledge in-house, Nomios Germany can handle the most complex projects. In this case, knowing the customer's network for a while and providing 24/7 support, Nomios Germany was there from the start being introduced to the new needs and challenges. As their trusted partner for years, Post also saw the opportunity to engage with Nomios Germany to improve the overall service delivered to the other business functions and increase the security and visibility into their different types of network elements.
“We have incredibly complex and diverse environments in our data centres. Our challenge was to interoperate with several data centres scattered across the country and allow workloads to move east-west traffic between those data centres. We also needed to bring new designs by delivering secure platform connectivity with service chaining in an automated way and keep end-to-end traffic visibility." - Akim Ziadi, head of ICT infrastructure at POST Luxembourg
The challenge
To create its future proof telco cloud, the Post Luxembourg IT team set out to build one of the most advanced, operationally efficient network data centres possible, with the help of Nomios Germany. A primary objective was to run any workload on any cloud and any deployment while creating a single cohesive infrastructure that the ICT team could manage easily.
“We have incredibly complex and diverse environments in our data centres,” Ziadi says. “Our challenge was to interoperate with several data centres scattered across the country and allow workloads to move east-west traffic between those data centres. We also needed to bring new designs by delivering secure platform connectivity with service chaining in an automated way and keep end-to-end traffic visibility."
Referring to these interoperabilities from one data centre to another, by definition, we are talking about a multi-cloud model to support this, meaning a model of using multiple cloud services for your organisation's data and applications. Although multi-cloud environments are quickly standardised, it is important to be aware that each platform has various advantages and disadvantages. It is therefore essential to formulate a clear policy in advance with a decision tree that compares the needs against selected platforms to achieve a quick and problem-free migration. A big thing to consider here is that multi-cloud solutions also require a higher demand for the network.
"Nomios Germany helped us in our search for the best fitting solution and together we found that the Contrail Enterprise Multicloud platform with Juniper Insights met all our criteria and is aligned with Post Luxembourg’s vision of intent-driven networking automation, says Akim Zaidi”
Multicloud approach
A growing number of organisations are embracing a multi-cloud strategy as part of their digital transformation. Each benefit associated with a multi-cloud strategy can prove instrumental in establishing or maintaining a competitive advantage in today's digital economy.
- The main reasons why Contrail Enterprise Multicloud is the best fit for POST Luxembourg, meeting their following requirements and addressing their operational limitations, are:
- A network architecture that can implement and increase automation across its multi-cloud-ready data centres.
- The ability to provision and enable seamless end-to-end multitenancy.
- Easy scalability of service platforms and data centres through standards.
- The ability to provide external connectivity through unified management policies.
The path to 5G
Even as demand for 5G, video-on-demand, and other digital services grow, Post Luxembourg is well prepared to deliver exceptional digital experiences. The strong partnership between trusted advisor Nomios Germany and supplier Juniper has resulted in a flexible telco cloud for Post Luxembourg that scales as it delivers services to its customers.
“For network and service providers which require interoperability, standards are everything. If you do not follow standards, you cannot interoperate easily with third parties. Our challenge will be to bring edge computing and local networks that need to be connected to our core, delivering 5G service on-premises for ultra-reliable low latency,” Ziadi says.
“In this way, Post Luxembourg is well-positioned to support today’s and tomorrow’s most innovative and advanced technologies and solutions in its data centres. It keeps us ahead of our competition and enables us to meet our customers’ needs with their favourite mix of digital services,” he concludes.
Nomios Germany & Juniper Networks
When a business depends on its network to deliver mission-critical transactions, applications and services, Juniper Networks is a great choice. Constantly focused on understanding the customers’ needs, rather than forcing users to view data in a certain way, it has the capabilities to dig in and solve the hardest problems they face - problems that other technologies can’t, or simply won’t, approach. Nomios Germany and Juniper Networks have a long relationship and complement each other. You can count on Nomios Germanyfor the technical know-how and hands-on experience to accurately assess your networking requirements, and design, implement and manage a Juniper-based solution to suit your needs.
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