Network as a service

Consideration: Over the last year it’s estimated that 75 percent of organizations have accelerated their digital transformation initiatives.¹ In many cases your network is an essential platform for these initiatives. If there are times when your network is not able to keep up with the initiative’s implementation or is not capable of supporting its full potential, NaaS could be a good option.

Consideration: NaaS delivers on-demand consumption of networking that promises better scalability and greater elasticity, allowing your organization to quickly adjust capacity up or down in response to market conditions. NaaS enables you to focus on the outcomes you expect from your network rather than operating the network. Examples include securely connecting users to their applications, optimizing application experiences, and managing workloads in a hybrid world.

Consideration: Applications are the business, touching everything from customer interactions, employee productivity, and operational efficiency. Consequently, your infrastructure needs to be responsive to the speed of applications. NaaS provides an ideal model with the ability to route application traffic to help ensure outstanding user experience and to proactively address issues that occur.

Consideration: Multibranch networking, multicloud access, and securing the remote workforce are some of the more common use cases for NaaS implementation today. Benefits include the ability to rapidly deploy new sites, deliver a more secure and consistent application experience for customers and employees, achieve greater agility, and offload some of your network management tasks.

Consideration: You may have hesitation about transitioning some control over security and performance, especially in terms of your ability to identify and remediate network issues fast enough. Most NaaS offerings give you an option for greater or lesser control over day-to-day policy management. You have the flexibility to choose.

Consideration: Data is the lifeblood of an organization. Gone are the days when your data resided safely behind the corporate firewall in your data center. It’s now traversing the Internet, being generated in SaaS applications, at the edge, and stored in multiple clouds across multiple geographies. With data governance and privacy regulations increasing, you must be sure your NaaS provider has the capabilities and global presence to ensure data security and compliance everywhere.

Consideration: The pandemic has driven significant change in every respect. Many institutions that were previously reluctant to change have embraced digital. NaaS brings together the core networking capabilities needed to provide your organization the agility and flexibility to respond to dynamic market conditions. Make sure your NaaS service is being regularly updated to the latest capabilities you require to run your business effectively

Consideration: Selecting the right partner is a critical step. Partners should be able to assess your NaaS readiness and offer solutions tailored to your unique requirements and desired outcomes. This means deploying NaaS solutions into your environment, ensuring end-to-end security, and delivering and operating your solutions and security via managed services.

Consideration: IT complexity is trending upward with distributed users and applications and the expansion to cloud. NaaS simplifies. By delegating some of your network provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle management, NaaS means you can free up time for your networking experts to focus on higher-value projects that deliver more innovative services to the business.

Consideration: We’ve all had to delay significant projects due to a lack of resources or the upfront initial capital investment. Often though, it isn’t always about a lack of budget, but rather the lack of availability of internal subject matter expertise to plan, accurately estimate the initiative, and execute. It’s important to factor in the opportunity costs of these projects, which is sometimes overlooked, especially if the complexity of the current networking model is an accepted status quo. When business unit executives choose to “go to the cloud”, NaaS can help ensure that they are not lacking the appropriate network to support them.

Consideration: With talent shortages in networking on the rise, NaaS helps you simplify your network operations and lifecycle management, enabling your IT team to manage more of the network without the need to add resources.

Consideration: Because NaaS touches multiple capabilities across network operations, security, and cloud access, you’ll want to assemble the right team of NetOps, SecOps, and CloudOps to manage the relationship with your NaaS vendor. Together, they can ensure SLAs and SLOs are being met and you can achieve better networking outcomes faster.

Consideration: There are many criteria for selecting the best vendor and this will depend primarily on your desired outcomes.

Business considerations include:

• Partnership for the future. You’re looking not only for a vendor you can trust to deliver outcomes today, but also one that has the capital to invest in delivering continuous innovations so that the service continues to serve your organization into the future.
• A partner ecosystem for value-added services. Some NaaS vendors will have more established technology partnerships that can provide specialized services for industries. For example, although a NaaS vendor may not have a solution tailored for specific verticals or regional IT specifications, their partners may be able to offer integrated, value-added services to enhance solution results.
• Data and compliance. You should choose a vendor that provides robust security and a global presence to meet local regulatory and compliance requirements.

The ability to deliver on SLAs or SLOs. It’s helpful to think about which service levels are the most important for your strategy. For example, what are your unique connectivity, bandwidth, latency, and security requirements? NaaS with advanced AI-driven capabilities can help ensure service-level agreements (SLAs) and service-level objectives (SLOs) are met or exceeded.       

Technical considerations include:

• Integrated security. Some vendors “piece together” network security, relying on third-party capabilities. For example, a SASE vendor may offer SD-WAN, but not own security as part of their portfolio so they use a third party for security. Your chosen NaaS solution will ideally be based on fully integrated, on-premises and cloud-based security.
• Flexible management options. NaaS services are delivered via a cloud model to offer greater flexibility and customization than conventional infrastructure. Changes are implemented through software, not hardware. This is typically provided using self-service. IT teams can, for example, reconfigure their corporate networks on demand and add new branch locations in a fraction of the time.
• End-to-end visibility, including the Internet, cloud, and SaaS. NaaS provides proactive network monitoring, security policy enforcement, advanced firewall and packet inspection capabilities, and modeling of the performance of applications, as well as the underlying infrastructure over time. Organizations may also have an option to co-manage the NaaS.
• Streamlined troubleshooting with AI/ML guided remediation. NaaS solutions with advanced capabilities deliver AI-driven actionable insights to provide closed-loop issue resolution and can help IT improve utilization of services, optimize workload traffic, and protect the business by integrating networking with cloud security.
• Access to the right APIs. In order to get the most benefit from your NaaS deployment, it is essential that your provider offers an extensive range of APIs to integrate into your existing IT processes, as well as legacy business applications and platforms.