Network as a Service – Flexibility as Standard

In the last year, Network as a Service (NaaS) has emerged as an increasingly interesting approach for enterprise business. Essentially the NaaS model disrupts the traditional approaches to business connectivity, which offers fixed settings for bandwidth, routing and service characteristics. Instead, NaaS allows customers to connect as required, scaling their service provision up or down as needed.

There are many advantages to this approach. The inflexibility of traditional models means that you can’t easily introduce new applications to an existing network, you may not have enough bandwidth to access data quickly or you may simply be paying for a large amount of connectivity that you don’t always need. This new model provides you with a scalable range of services that allows you to budget for a per-Network user model, based on individual requirements. There are additional infrastructure benefits too, as a NaaS provision should include well-defined security and class of service options to wrap around the service.

Developments in areas such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) will allow network providers a greater degree of control over what services they can switch on, where, and how quickly. Those providers who can demonstrate experience and expertise with SDN are more likely to bring NaaS a step closer to a workable reality. I am pleased to say that Colt is already developing its thinking in this area. This higher degree of control should help promote the case for embracing NaaS as a viable option.

As the complexity of cloud-based storage and applications grows, it will become necessary to have a network provision that matches that complexity, without losing service capability. Pay-per-use may seem like too much of a change for some network managers to embrace, but I feel that once proof-of-concept has been demonstrated, in terms of capacity and reliability, it will be a model that will be widely embraced.