Telefónica Germany’s CTIO Mallik Rao: Cloud-native networking is a fundamental shift in how networks are designed, built, and operated
In sum – what to know:
Full network transformation – Cloud-native is not just a technology shift. It must span architecture, operations, and culture, expanding from core to edge.
Big obstacles – Telcos are strong at adoption but weak at disruption, and backward compatibility with older generations like 2G and 3G continues to slow progress.
For Telefónica Germany’s CTIO Mallik Rao, cloud-native networking is a fundamental shift in how networks are designed, built, and operated, and crucially, it must be treated as an end-to-end transformation, spanning technology, operations, and organizational culture.
“That is, you start with a specific domain, you expand quickly into other domains… And that is how I see it — from core to the edge,” he told RCR Wireless News. As this expansion happens, he continued, cloud must be seen as both a technology and an enabler of key capabilities like automation, network APIs, and new digital capabilities across the lifecycle, from engineering and planning to build and operations.
He also acknowledged that while significant progress has already been made across IT and digital services, networks remain the most challenging domain.
Digging into the challenges more, Rao shared that despite Telefónica’s progress, there is one key barrier holding the industry back. “I think the biggest one, I would say, is culture,” he said, adding that telcos are “very good [at] adoption, but we’re extremely bad [at] disruption.”
Legacy infrastructure remains another major constraint, particularly the industry’s insistence on backward compatibility. “While we launch 5G, 5G SA, maybe we’ll do 6G, but we will never forget 2G. We will never forget 3G,” Rao said, pointing to Telefónica Germany’s early 3G shutdown as a rare but necessary disruption that forced the organization to build forward-looking systems.
Vendor lock-in, however, is not Rao’s primary concern. Instead, he worries about supplier incentives and speed. “I’m actually not too worried about vendor lock-in,” he said, explaining that long vendor relationships are already the norm in telecom. The real challenge, he argued, is that vendors must balance the needs of operators moving aggressively toward cloud-native architectures with those that are not.
That tension has been particularly evident as Telefónica Germany moves critical workloads into public cloud environments. Early packet core deployments with Nokia and AWS required deep collaboration, Rao said, because “technology is not ready” at the outset — especially when adapting hyperscale infrastructure to telecom-grade network workloads. “Network workload will tell you how the hardware should behave,” he explained. Today, Telefónica Germany has 1.5 million packet core customers running in public cloud and plans to migrate at least 20% of its total packet core workload.
Looking ahead to 6G, Rao sees cloud-native principles accelerating rather than being replaced. Telefónica Germany is now focused on “cloud at scale,” defined as having at least 20% of the business running on cloud infrastructure across central, edge, and on-prem environments. “It will not go back to on-prem kind of say vertical stack world,” he said.
