If you own something, you not only pay to buy it, but you also pay to run it, troubleshoot it, and upgrade it. What’s the alternative? Get all those things at one lower price by paying for a service subscription model.
Network as a service (NaaS), sometimes called managed networks, consists of offering network functionality on a subscription basis, often through the cloud. Your NaaS provider will virtualize your network setup and give your organization the ability to rely on a network that is not physically set up in on-premises hardware.
NaaS has tremendous appeal as an emerging model for organizations to consume network infrastructure through flexible operating expense (OpEx) subscriptions, inclusive of hardware, software, management tools, licenses, and lifecycle services. Companies are increasingly adopting a cloud model that enables their IT team to simplify how they operate the network and reach their technology enhancement goals without needing to invest in owning, building, or maintaining their own hardware infrastructure.
Improved Application Experience
In a multicloud world, it’s critical to have connectivity that supports the same user experience as if the application was hosted in-house. NaaS provides AI-driven capabilities to help ensure SLAs and SLOs for capacity are met or exceeded. NaaS lets you route application traffic to help ensure outstanding user experience and to proactively address any issues that occur.
Improved Quality of Service Unified Approach Across All Office Locations
NaaS frees organizations from having to separately manage expensive network resources like LANs at each location. By moving the infrastructure to the cloud, multiple branches can ubiquitously share wireless connectivity through one centralized data centre. This unified approach gives companies full network visibility across their stores, unlocking powerful analytics that can be used to improve performance across the organization.
Improved Network Insights
The need for IT to anticipate issues is a key business driver for enterprise adoption of NaaS. NaaS can relieve many of the demands and pressures, and it can position your IT team to meet existing and longer-term network needs. NaaS provides security policy enforcement, proactive network monitoring, advanced firewall and packet inspection capabilities, and modelling of the performance of applications and the underlying infrastructure over time.
You may also have an option to co-manage the NaaS. Those that rely on legacy onsite hardware are dealing with a lack of visibility into network and application performance. Moving to NaaS will give your IT team the ability to identify and remediate potential threats within your environment, laying the groundwork for proactive network monitoring, application delivery, and failover from redundant connections.
Flexible Wi-Fi Connectivity
NaaS delivers the “always-on” connectivity that mission-critical organizations demand. It ensures a centralized management of your Wi-Fi deployment and lays the foundation of a distributed multisite network using a single interface. Businesses and organizations need a cost-effective model to ensure sufficient bandwidth for connectivity within and beyond the office walls. Growing companies with tight budgets and limited IT resources can benefit from the cost-effective network flexibility that NaaS provides. Whether staff are working from home, sharing documents and presentations, or streaming a company video town hall across eight offices, a cloud-based network solution ensures reliable access from any location. Even small businesses can benefit, as managed networks allow them to offload day-to-day hardware maintenance and focus on growing their business.
Enhanced Network Security
NaaS results in tighter integration between the network and the network security. If you want to move away from the vendors who “piece together” network security, start a conversation about the benefits of NaaS with your team. NaaS solutions provide on-premise and cloud-based security to meet today’s business needs, thereby accelerating the transition to a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture, where and when it’s needed. Thanks to robust security features, NaaS helps protect even the most sensitive data for healthcare providers and many other heavily regulated industries. Intrusion prevention, identity-based firewalls, and advanced malware protection help defend networks from data theft or cyberattack.
Scalable Support for the Organization
NaaS helps companies stay current with the latest technology. This flexibility has been very convenient during the COVID-19 pandemic. When companies expand their geographic footprint and add new locations, NaaS makes it easy to seamlessly scale network operations. NaaS is inherently more scalable than the traditional purchase and operate-based networks. Organizations that adopt NaaS purchase more capacity when they need it instead of investing capital upfront to deploy, configure, and secure additional hardware. This means they can scale up or down quickly as needs change.
A cloud-based solution is flexible enough to support business fluctuations, whether you need to quickly add or remove users, or provision and decommission entire offices.
Significant Cost Reduction
For companies in any industry, one of the biggest benefits of NaaS is the cost savings it provides. The virtualized service model eliminates the hefty capital expenditure traditionally associated with a major hardware purchase. Instead, companies pay a predictable monthly subscription price that includes fully managed support and built-in upgrades. This allows organizations to cut IT costs while improving network quality.
Simplified IT Management & Access to Expertise
At ThinkTel, our goal is to help our customers simplify technology management as they work with our in-house experts to reach their unified communication goals. Managing your own infrastructure requires timely upgrades, bug fixes, and security patches. IT staff may have to travel to different offices or network centres to make these changes. NaaS enables the continuous delivery of fixes, features, and capabilities. It automates multiple processes, such as onboarding new users, and provides orchestration and optimization for maximum performance, which can help eliminate the time and money otherwise spent on these processes. Enterprises rely on vendors to provide full-lifecycle management and to even become proactive.
Working with a trusted NaaS provider will expand your team with qualified and experienced personnel who have helped other organizations succeed. The right business services partner will be at your side throughout the project, from the planning phase all the way through to deployment.
Final Words
Unless your organization is already in the networking business, spending time on building your network in house is distracting from your core priorities as an organization. Implementing network as a service (NaaS) has a variety of advantages: cutting costs, increasing uptime, maximizing your performance, and more.
To learn how NaaS might be the right choice for your business, reach out to us for a no-cost consultation.
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