Satellite and Cloud Computing (GVF Webinar)

Thursday, September 29, 2022. 10am UK / 3pm ET.
Speaker: Albie Bester, Marketing Development Manager, Intelsat.

Cloud computing has evolved since the turn of the 21st century, but only in the last decade has there been a surge in adoption of Cloud-based technologies. Whilst rather late, compared to other segments of the ICT sector, in realising the advantages of incorporating the Cloud into its business models, the satellite industry – legacy players and NewSpace entrants – now boasts extensive partnerships with Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). Commercial satellite constellations generate a lot of data requiring storage, processing, and analysis, making them prime CSP customers. Enterprise digitalisation and cloud migration is being adopted by more and more of the satellite industry’s traditional and long-standing end-user customers and expansion of edge computing beyond traditional terrestrial network connections drives direct connections between data centres and satellite broadband ground stations to reduce latency and increase application speeds.

Many customers want remote IoT/IIoT, and other-sourced data resources, to be accessible from multiple originating locations and transmitted, via big data analytics infrastructure, on to decision-making centres. Development of ‘Managed Platform-as-a-Service’ (MPaaS) solutions – a facet of the ‘X-as-a-Service’ Cloud environment within which IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service) are primary elements – can combine satellite hubs, teleport/data centre uplinks, and terrestrial networking contributions, enabling easy deployment of high-throughput connectivity in vertical market user customer locations across the globe. The addition of new GEO HTS generations, expanding MEO constellation capacity, and upgraded and new LEO mega-constellations brings vast additional bandwidth capability to orbit which will further facilitate the rise of fully managed Satcom services. These are just some aspects of the evolving relationship between satellite and the Cloud, a relationship to be more thoroughly explored in this webinar discussion.