What the cloud giveth, the cloud’s insecurity can take away
Revenue management specialist CSG has announced a new raft of cloud native software services to help mobile network operators (MNOs) to monetise their service. But security specialist TrafficGuard has warned that many MNOs could lose money to fraudsters faster than they make it, if they scale up without security.
On April 12th CSG announced a new channel for its services to the mobile industry. CKH Innovations Opportunities Development (CKH IOD) is now selling CSG’s cloud-native, end-to-end software as a service (SaaS) system to offer new types of billing and customer relationship management to multinational mobile virtual network operators (MVNO) and Internet of Things (IoT) customers.
The CSG systems offer instant online charging and can differentiate across a range of markets, services, ratings and charging models at scale for any portfolio of wireless and digital service offerings. Quarterly software releases make it easy for CKH IOD to keep up with the pace of change, and configurable offer management features allow for quick setup and launch of new products. These improvements help CKH IOD to manage its growing ecosystem of business relationships. The ‘attractive, impactful offerings’, such as their newly launched eSIM, drive growth and will monetise the travel market as the world reopens, according to Joe Parker, CEO at CKH IOD.
“CSG gives CKH IOD the flexibility and scalability to innovate with changing business models,” said Parker, “CSG’s delivery capability and expertise enabled CKH IOD to go live on time and within budget. The power of the cloud [lets] our teams have the underlying billing, rating, and charging capability needed to sell MVNO and IoT solutions now and into the future.”
Operators want to drive new business growth and build loyal partner relationships by making it easier to manage these demanding wholesale, MVNO, IoT, and B2B2X business models, according to James Kirby, CSG’s head of Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
“Cloud-native microservices [are the] agile platform they need to transform their business,” said Kirby, “CSG can handle these complicated projects and make it easy to sell and monetise connectivity at an immense scale.” However, these rapid expansion can come at a cost if they expose the company to fraudsters. Security company TrafficGuard, has warned that MNOs are losing up to 20 per cent of their digital marketing budgets to fraudulent or invalid traffic.
TrafficGuard runs an anti-fraud service for MNOs and MVNOs like Singtel, M1 and MyRepublic. In 2020, T-Mobile was cheated by fraudulent Net bots, maliciously created and distributed to take advantage of the monetary rewards it offered. Preventing fraudulent traffic might be the fastest and simplest ways to improve a telco’s returns on investment and capture more subscribers, according to Chad Kinlay, Chief Marketing Officer at TrafficGuard. Kinlay has offered to expand on this for Mobile Europe this week.