Survey: 94% of Operators Have NFV Plans

While NFV deployments are still in the early stages, recent research by the OPNFV Project found that 94% of the operators in its survey had NFV strategy plans in place.

The survey, conducted by Heavy Reading for the Open Platform for NFV Project Inc. , said that 6% of the operators had no NFV strategy planned at all, compared to 14% in September of last year.

The research, which was released at last week's OPNFV Summit in Berlin, said the top concerns for the more than 90 network operator professionals in the survey were OSS/BSS, security and MANO.

Overall, security was cited as the top priority that the Linux Foundation 's OPNFV Project should investigate. To address those security concerns, the OPNFV Project formed a security working group last year.

While 99% of those surveyed concurred that OPNFV was poised to accelerate the adoption of NFV, there are still some hurdles to clear. The biggest hurdles cited were "lack of skill set" and "lack of upper management support." Despite those barriers, 47% recognized NFV as a priority for their company.

The Linux Foundation founded OPNFV almost two years ago. In Febuary, the Linux Foundation announced its OPEN-O orchestration platform. (See TT Webinar: Orchestrating SDN & NFV With OPEN-O.)

— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation