How NaaS Tackles Business Complexity

Enterprises also face problems such as a lack of visibility into multiple cloud computing resources’ readiness, health status, consumption patterns, cloud sprawl, security concerns, and interoperability issues. Monitoring operations across multiple sources requires significant IT resources. With increased focus on cost controls, most IT departments do not have the bandwidth to become domain experts for every cloud provider.

See More: 4 Challenges of the Edge to Cloud Evolution

NaaS Comes of Age

It’s in the cloud that we have seen the emergence of Network as a Service (NaaS), a model that delivers hardware, software, licenses, and services through flexible operating expense subscription-based offerings via a NaaS provider. Organizations using NaaS can evolve from legacy network models requiring capital expenses to procure, deploy and maintain the hardware and software necessary to deliver a required network architecture. NaaS extends typical SaaS benefits to the network, reducing business complexity, optimizing operations and effectively managing spend:

• Flexibility, cost control, scalability: Removing the CapEx element, NaaS helps organizations align costs with usage, providing the flexibility to choose services customizable to their specific needs and making budgeting more predictable. Another financial benefit of NaaS is the ability “to pay as you grow.” Organizations don’t pay for unused surplus capacity, and cloud elasticity enables them to scale services up or down as their needs change without incurring the costs and complexity of purchasing and configuring additional network resources.
• Greater visibility and insights: NaaS provides organizations with greater visibility and centralized control across its entire network, including multiple clouds, captured and visualized in a dashboard – a single source of truth. This enables better-informed decision-making regarding allocating network resources and bandwidth. As a result, they spend less time managing the network and can focus instead on value-add strategic initiatives.
• Faster time to service: The elimination of hardware and software procurement and deployment cycles, coupled with a more agile development and consumption model, makes NaaS architectures appealing to large customers that need tighter network SLAs, as well as to smaller firms who want to outsource all or part of their network to a NaaS provider.
• Optimized technology: Using the NaaS subscription model means operations such as network planning, deployment, operational management, monitoring, upgrades, troubleshooting, and decommissioning can be contracted out. The continuous delivery of new fixes, features and capabilities automatically and rapidly deployed through the vendor means enterprises always have access to more advanced technologies across their network lifecycles. Business is accelerated, driving modernization and innovation and removing technical debt, the accumulated cost of maintaining and improving a software system over time.
• Improved security: NaaS providers typically offer robust security measures to protect the network from cyber threats, reducing operational risk and maintaining network integrity through the rapid deployment of new features. Businesses can benefit from vendor SLAs protecting them from security flaws brought on by outdated hardware or setups and benefit from enterprise-level security without having to invest in expensive security solutions.
• Freeing up expertise: By outsourcing networking services, businesses can reduce the complexity of managing their own network infrastructure. The provider manages the burden of infrastructure deployment, scaling, and day-to-day management and maintenance, freeing up the business to focus on its core activities. 

See More: Guide to Network as a Service (NaaS) and Best Practices

Industry Adoption

The adoption of NaaS models is gathering momentum as more organizations realize its viability as a cost-effective, scalable and easier-to-manage replacement for legacy network setups and on-premises hardware. Here are a couple of examples:

Retail 

The ability to securely connect multiple location endpoints – retail stores, warehouses, suppliers, logistics – through a single streamlined NaaS solution enables retailers to deploy new technologies quickly and build secure multi-cloud/multi-region networks with complete visibility. 

Retailers can capture customer insights from any number of sources, effectively manage inventory, plan and budget more predictably, scale operations as needed and make informed decisions to improve customer experience by keeping their supply chains agile and efficient. Real-time monitoring and security patching and updates are managed by the vendor, meaning that retailers have up-to-date protection against malware and ransomware attacks.

Healthcare 

When dealing with huge amounts of patients’ sensitive information across medical facilities and multiple regions that must be stored securely, NaaS offers healthcare providers highly reliable, secure, low-latency connectivity between different cloud environments. NaaS also supports HIPAA and other regulatory requirements as it can be configured to encrypt data before transmission. The scalability and reliability of NaaS also make it suitable for use in satellite medical clinics and pop-up clinics.

Future Proofing Network Infrastructures

The NaaS market gathers momentum in many sectors, addressing the unique needs of single and multi-cloud network environments. Offering greater levels of automation and programmability, along with rapid deployment, current software releases and flexible subscription options, NaaS simplifies networking. Providing a holistic solution that reduces the cost and complexity of doing business in the cloud by providing a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solution, effectively future-proofing network infrastructures.

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