Unlocking Agility: A Seamless Journey from VMware Legacy to Cloud‑Native Excellence

Background

A leading Tier‑2 operator in Europe, serving approximately 3.3 million mobile subscribers across six markets, initiated a cloud‑first modernization to exit legacy virtualization and establish a container‑ready foundation for next‑generation services. Recognized for high‑quality broadband and converged offerings, the operator sought a compliance‑ready, secure architecture that accelerates hyperscale adoption, standardizes identity and observability, and enables rapid rollout of new services without disrupting live operations.

Challenges

Transitioning from legacy, monolithic core environments into a cloud‑native, distributed 5G architecture introduced several challenges as outlined below:

• Fragmented operational landscape across aging virtualized platforms, limiting agility in modernization efforts
• Limited visibility into service and network dependencies, increasing risk during migration and scaling activities
• Evolving regulatory and compliance obligations requiring continuous validation across core functions and interfaces
• Complexity of coordinating multi‑vendor network functions and ensuring consistent behavior across environments
• Requirement for seamless, zero‑disruption transitions to safeguard live services during upgrades and functional changes

Solution

Tata Elxsi deployed a purpose‑built solution that enables high‑fidelity validation and smooth, continuous evolution of the operator’s cloud‑native 5G Core.

The solution delivers three major capabilities:

• End‑to‑end core network emulation: It accurately models both control‑plane and user‑plane functions, allowing safe testing of upgrades, scaling policies, and service behaviors without impacting the live network.
• Intent‑driven automation: to orchestrate configuration, policies, and lifecycle events consistently across distributed core environments
• Continuous state validation: Telemetry-based monitoring, fault injection, and real‑time checks compare expected vs. actual network function performance, enabling early issue detection and faster resolution.

Impact

The solution delivered the following benefits:

• Strengthened core reliability through deterministic, pre‑validated behavior across control and user plane functions
• Significant reduction in validation cycles, enabling ~40% faster rollout of new 5G core features and services
• ~50% improvement in incident resolution, driven by fault‑injection insights and continuous state verification
• Lower operational overhead through intent‑aligned automation and closed‑loop corrections
• Enhanced assurance for slice performance, supporting consistent, SLA‑driven service delivery

Services Rendered

• Discovery
• Migration
• Compliance
• Security
• Automation
• Observability
• Networking
• Enablement (BOOT/CCoE)