Leveraging an Operational Data Layer for Telco Success

The emergence of 5G network communication, IoT devices, edge computing, and AI have accelerated structural changes within the telecommunications industry, creating new needs and opportunities. To remain competitive, telcos must embrace this technology-driven transformation by defining a robust data strategy. Such a strategy should enhance operational efficiency and provide unique value to customers, and should ultimately enable telcos to set themselves apart from their competitors.

All of this can be attained by leveraging an operational data layer (ODL) with MongoDB. Operating a consolidated ODL opens new business opportunities that telcos can incorporate into their value matrix, including customer support systems, AI-enriched applications, and IoT-oriented services. These unlocked capacities will help telecommunications companies succeed in a competitive market.

Understanding the operational data layer

An ODL is an architectural pattern that centrally integrates and organizes siloed enterprise data, making it available to consuming applications. It acts as an intermediary between data producers and consumers. This architecture pattern is illustrated below:

In this diagram, MongoDB Atlas acts as the ODL, centrally integrating siloed data from multiple sources, including CRM, HR, and billing. Initially, data is extracted to the ODL, transformed according to established requirements, and then loaded to the MongoDB database. By means of delta loads, the ODL is kept in sync over time. Consuming applications, both operational and analytical, access the ODL through an API layer, which delivers a common set of methods for users, and enforces security standards throughout the organization.

Enhancing operational efficiency with MongoDB and the ODL

At its core, implementing an ODL with MongoDB provides access to a rich document model and a data developer platform that boosts operational efficiency and unlocks the value of previously siloed enterprise data. The ODL attains this efficiency through a set of key capabilities inherent to MongoDB.

The ODL benefits from the flexibility of the document model that adapts its schema to any application requirement while supporting multiple data structures. This polymorphic structure allows variations from document to document liberating applications from rigid schemas and supporting merging from non-identical entities.

Telcos gain speed in development—which translates to better performance—when accessing data through an ODL, as they avoid costly join operations required by legacy applications. MongoDB provides a unique place for data storage that can be accessed in a single database operation decreasing end-user response times.

Telcos can leverage MongoDB’s versatility to cast multiple workloads, store any data type, and to adopt a rich query language that executes complex operations. Subsequently, the ODL accepts sophisticated query pipelines capable of processing text, images, videos, geospatial data, facet search, analytical transformations, time series, and more.

Horizontal and vertical scalability empowers telcos to receive large data volumes and high traffic loads essential for modern applications. This mechanism is achieved through sharding, a process that partitions and distributes data across multiple nodes, accommodating fluctuating workload demands and enhancing overall system performance.

An ODL running in MongoDB Atlas benefits from a multi-cloud strategy that allows deployments across multiple cloud providers. This approach mitigates vendor lock-in risks, grants global coverage, and adapts to infrastructure requirements—ensuring that applications adhere to cost constraints, achieve performance benchmarks, and maintain regulatory compliance.

MongoDB provides a robust security framework for storing and managing sensitive data due to its built-in tools—including encryption, authentication, authorization, network security, and auditing—thus protecting data against information breaches. It also complies with important international regulations for telcos like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

MongoDB provides a modern data platform designed to build, manage and scale applications in a unified developer experience. The developer platform fosters innovation allowing developers to access a variety of features to manage their ODL including Atlas Vector Search, Atlas Monitoring, and Atlas Triggers, among others.

Using the ODL to gain a competitive advantage

Fostering operational efficiency through an ODL is the initial step toward opening a new business that will eventually translate into a competitive advantage. Accordingly, telcos need to develop their own strategies and capitalize on the benefits from these unlocked opportunities, differentiating themselves in the industry. Well-known telcos have already leveraged this approach, creating successful business outcomes.

They consolidate single-view instances, concentrating information from different business lines—such as mobile, fixed lines, broadband, and TV/entertainment—into MongoDB Atlas. This environment is well-suited for building personalized customer management solutions, overcoming challenges with siloed data environments. These telcos choose MongoDB because it offers a flexible data model that facilitates data aggregation and horizontal scaling, allowing them to efficiently leverage customer data to build customer-centric applications.

Additionally, leading telcos are leveraging AI to enhance their operations, safeguard their business, and improve their services. One prominent use of AI is fraud detection and prevention. This is a critical area that, if poorly managed, can lead to negative consequences like financial losses, unmeasurable reputational damage, and unhinged security network risks. A consolidated ODL serves as a gateway for implementing fraud detection measures. Nowadays, MongoDB’s platform is ingesting and storing terabytes of data from multiple platforms to leverage AI models, potentially saving millions of dollars for telcos.

Telcos are also capitalizing on their networks and the MongoDB ODL by effectively managing the vast amounts of data generated by IoT devices, and adding new end-to-end services. MongoDB is helping large telcos effectively implement IoT platforms supplying scalability for growing device demand, flexibility to manage data model changes, and automatic data tiering to reduce storage costs. These capabilities ultimately improve customer experiences and speed time to market for new applications.

Furthermore, ODLs improve product catalog management systems, which are increasingly common in the industry due to telcos’ expanding their offering to a broader set of products, from phone plans to bundled entertainment services. ODLs upgrade the product catalog, allowing for real-time product personalization and analytics. MongoDB assists telcos in upgrading their product catalog systems, enabling advanced search capabilities, reducing development time, and supporting seasonal workload demand.

Finally, an ODL accelerates the modernization of monolithic relational database systems that struggle to manage exponential data growth and to adapt to evolving business needs. Telcos use MongoDB in their modernization efforts to deliver 3 to 5x faster operations, allowing scaling to millions of records per day, while at the same time reducing their costs—typically by 50% or more.

Future directions

This blog highlights how implementing an ODL with MongoDB can unlock telcos’ ability to achieve operational efficiency through the native capabilities of MongoDB and its cloud offering. This innovative architecture not only improves operations, but also unlocks business opportunities that are the foundation for new competitive advantages. These enhanced capabilities represent the backbone to consolidate telcos’ strategic positioning, ultimately differentiating from their competitors in powerful ways.

Visit our MongoDB for Telecommunications solutions page to learn more.

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