The Network’s Cloudy Future: NaaS Is the New SaaS
- By Lachlan Colquhoun
- September 30, 2024
Enterprises are facing challenges with their existing network architectures due to considerable shifts in their business models and requirements, and many organizations are finding a solution to accessing Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) offerings.
Driving the momentum for NaaS is a confluence of factors for end-user enterprises and service providers.
On one side, service providers have increasing access to the capabilities required for delivering cloud-like network services.
Enterprise customers, for their part, are increasingly consuming network-based services like they consume computing and storage services in the cloud.
Drivers and challenges
The not-for-profit industry group, the MEF Forum, has described the NaaS landscape in a new whitepaper outlining its drivers and challenges.
The whitepaper acknowledged the momentum for the movement of workloads to cloud environments.
“However, the networks required to connect to these workloads are still often sold and managed in a legacy format, with long, fixed-term contracts and lengthy delivery timelines,” the whitepaper says.
“Whereas enterprises can use services from cloud providers very quickly and for short durations, they cannot necessarily achieve that with the legacy network services that connect them to those clouds.
“For example, if an enterprise can buy cloud compute for a month-long project within ten minutes, but they must buy the network service that connects to that cloud for one year, and it takes two weeks to put in place, then, from the enterprise’s point of view, the network service is irrelevant.”
NaaS offerings must match cloud offerings in terms of time to implement and contract length. As a result, enterprises seek connectivity services within a cloud-like consumption model that can be provisioned in near real-time, scaled or adapted quickly, and available under flexible commercial models.
“There is a need for flexible, scalable, on-demand-network service provider solutions that customers can self-manage.”
This paradigm empowers enterprises to react quickly to changing market conditions, for example, by scaling bandwidth up when demand increases or rerouting a circuit when an outage occurs.
Automation has also become critical. Enterprises are looking for platforms on which the service provisioned is fully automated, allowing real-time changes to the network and provisioning multiple services over the same access element.
Although service providers may need to compromise their experience in some situations, such as when manual work is required for physical access or installing new fiber or equipment, they need to minimize those scenarios through strategies like pre-provisioning.
Enterprises also require the ability to mix and match short- and long-term agreements to accommodate a combination of network services.
Traditional billing models of fixed, monthly rental fees that align with fixed, static agreements no longer suit their needs.
API integration
The whitepaper also notes the momentum for API support as enterprises look to ensure they can programmatically consume network services through their internal applications.
“API integration with network service providers will allow enterprises to integrate network orchestration into their workflows, increasing efficiency and, most importantly, enabling new consumption models that foster innovation,” the whitepaper says.
The service provider networks have adapted to changing business requirements to meet the requirements of connected enterprises operating in complex digital ecosystems with diverse applications, services, users, and devices.
The whitepaper outlines some of these trends, such as the move from a human-centric process to automated service lifecycle management, which is leaner and more highly scalable.
Network connections are evolving from fixed to more agile, on-demand services.
“The traditional fixed service architectures have offered stable connectivity and predictable performance,” the whitepaper says.
“However, as enterprises transform towards rapid cloud integration with expectations focused on application performance, there is a need for flexible, scalable, on-demand-network service provider solutions that customers can self-manage based on their application requirements, service quality requirements, and commercial considerations.”
These include on-demand bandwidth to scale capacity up (or down) from a base of committed connection bandwidth in near-real time.
Vulnerable to attacks
Other considerations include connectivity, dynamic routing, QoS management to adjust the quality of service (QoS) parameters for customer traffic or application requirements, and ultimately, security, where the need is to dynamically activate and change different levels of security policies based on customer applications.
“The current distributed nature of network and security architectures makes it difficult to implement end-to-end security-management practices, leaving businesses more vulnerable to cyberattacks,” the whitepaper says.
“To address this challenge, a shift towards converged network and security solutions is a key requirement from enterprises, by leveraging an orchestration platform that enables the on-demand management of the network and, at the same time, the security functionalities.”
Image credit: iStockphoto/Peach_iStock
Lachlan Colquhoun
Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their business models.