Network as a Service (Naas) vs Network

In the business world, it seems that more and more things that used to be products are now services – especially in technology. They put the acronym ‘aaS’ (as a Service) after just about everything to do with computing. These new offerings allow the user access to endpoints which are generally driven by Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), but for everyday use they are usually controlled with a web console or web browser.

The most recognizable are:

Hardware (Haas)
Software (Saas)
Infrastructure (IaaS)
Platform (PaaS)
Integration Platform (iPaaS)
and so forth…

Now there’s .

What does NaaS mean?

Network as a Service is not entirely new. The concept has been a component of cloud computing since the beginning in some form or another, but now it’s all grown up and deserves its own acronym.

A business can choose to make a huge capital investment into putting a physical, local network in place, or they can avail themselves of the use of one ‘as a service’ – akin to paying for the milk without buying the cow.

The large-scale transition to a remote workforce has caused a quantum leap in cloud computing, and providers have sought better ways for businesses to initiate a flexible and easy experience with the cloud. The early days when a company had to send an IT employee through extensive training in order to use Microsoft Azure are all but gone – relegated to huge companies with large in-house IT departments.

Cloud services providers have responded to the growth in businesses with many remote employees by upping the range and scope of ‘as a Service’ offerings. NaaS benefits from the advances made in its main 3 segments:

IaaS Networking Services
Infrastructure as a Service is offered by Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS). As a stand-alone, IaaS leaves it to the customer to maintain and manage the virtualization technologies and servers that make up the key infrastructure networking components.

Managed NaaS
With Managed NaaS, a 3^rd party, such as a Managed Services Provider (MSP) or telecom company delivers the networking hardware and software to the business customer - provided on a monthly subscription or retainer basis. The responsibility for maintaining and managing the client’s network stays with the MSP or telecom service.

Enterprise NaaS
In the ‘aaS’ realm, this is the ‘One Ring to rule them all’. It typically falls within the realm of Managed IT Services – usually through a 3^rd party, but sometimes offered through the cloud host (which is extremely limited in its scope of services and responsibility). This pulls all the other ‘aaSes’ under its own umbrella, incorporating everything and creating a ‘turn-key’ experience for the business customer, with little or no management required of the subscriber.

What are the benefits of NaaS?

Primarily, it relieves the end user enterprise from the burden of buying and managing a physical network. NaaS is one of the components of fully contained platforms such as Microsoft 365. It was not very long ago that most of these types of components had to be instituted separately, and then integrated into network operations. It’s akin to the difference between making a sandwich or buying a sandwich.

With all the utility offered with Microsoft 365, it isn’t as cost-effective to buy a piece of it through an independent NaaS provider. It offers some cloud capabilities, but Microsoft 365 offers much more, including Office 365.

Whichever platform you choose, you will benefit from:

Lower Costs Overall: Maintaining and upgrading a physical network is a significant and recurring capital expense – one which many business owners put off until the problems caused by old, underpowered hardware negatively affect productivity.

Enhanced Performance and Productivity: When your network, either physical or virtual, is humming quickly along, worker productivity is a straight, uninterrupted line from the start of a project to the finish.

System Optimization: This is something every Managed IT Services provider continues to tweak, making adjustments to ensure network speed and reliability remain at top efficiency levels to account for factors such as new or upgraded software and increased system traffic. Increased network uptime equals increased productivity.

Better Security: A physical network should have the best next-generation security measures in place, but that is the responsibility of the business. A NaaS provider will generally update these and more enhanced measures as a matter of routine.

Enhanced Proactive Maintenance: Any decent IT provider should be on top of predictive maintenance, but many companies do not even know how good their IT really is – until a disaster occurs. With a NaaS provider, this function is easy and automatic.

Summary

As previously noted, NaaS is not new, but as a standalone service, rather than a component that runs beneath the surface of other offerings, it has come into its own. It is one of a number of ways to reach a similar goal: Putting all of your computing in the cloud. With all the choices available, the savvy business owner or administrator needs to do their homework to make sure they choose what works best for their business needs. This is one of those areas where offerings seem to sound similar but are not.