Is Network-as-a-Service Your Golden Ticket?

Before rallying every department to embark on the journey towards implementing Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), you must identify your specific network requirements such as bandwidth and latency, in addition to understanding ingress and egress points.

Knowing what questions to ask and relying on vendors for guidance can help mitigate the challenges posed by NaaS implementation.

In this archived keynote session, Carrie Goetz, Principal and CTO of StrategITcom, explores the NaaS fundamentals, how to decide if it’s the right solution for your business, and where to begin.

This segment was part of our live virtual event titled, “How to Make Network Management Easier in 2024-25” The event was presented by Network Computing on September 19, 2024.

A transcript of the video follows below. Minor edits have been made for clarity.

Carrie Goetz: So, let's think about some of the advantages. We've talked about what network-as-a-service (NaaS) is. How do we figure out what we need to implement?

What's the best way to put that in our portfolio and our active compute environments? I think the first thing that is helpful to do is to come up with that statement of need. Company XXX, we need a network in this location that will have this much bandwidth and this much latency.

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Here are our SLAs, whatever that needs to be. Now, here's the tricky part. When you're evaluating a new technology, or you're going for something new like NaaS, you don't always know what you need to ask.

So, that's where you can rely on vendors to figure out what you don't know. The other thing is you are really going to have to know what you're replacing. If you're going to look at NaaS, you need to know all the points of ingress and egress for your network.

How do people get in and out? Which locations are coming in securely? How many people are coming in from non-secure locations or open access points? What are those points, and what are we replacing?

In many cases, these studies are eye openers. I can't tell you how many of these I've done over my career. People are so surprised that they have these extra lines out there.

They're surprised they have connectivity to office locations that don't exist, and maybe some old carrier lines. There was a whole industry at one time that just went through people's phone records to figure out lines that were not in use anymore.

It is a management process when you're talking about wide area networks and local area networks and devices on the networks. Figure out where these people are and make sure that when somebody leaves, all their equipment comes back, and those lines get shut down.

Related:NaaS for Enterprises: Insights from MEF's Global NaaS Event 2024

If we do this as a service, then we have those dashboards and it's a little easier to do that. Honestly, we have other people that can help and tell us which ones aren't getting anything.

The other thing you want to do is you want to involve all your departments. You want to get a super user and a department head from each department. And the reason for that is that sometimes you're going to find applications that exist that those departments use.

But maybe the IT department doesn't know anything about it, and it truly happens. I can't tell you the number of times that I've seen that happen. But what you'll also find in this discovery is there might be applications that they have that might have a fixed IP address.

There may be some that absolutely cannot go down. However, maybe now is a good time to add as we're going through all these points of ingress and egress. We're also looking at our disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

This is also the time that we assign risk to those applications and figure out which ones we need to put on an always up network. Which ones are out? If they go down, it's going to be inconvenient, but it's not going to kill us.

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Which of these are nice to have, but maybe this technology ends up somewhere else? So normally, when you see these network projects take place, the good thing is that we are now assimilating everything that we're really using on our networks.

We're figuring out what all our software is, where all these ingress and egress points are, and who our users are. This becomes a big part of your disaster recovery plan, or at least a check of your disaster recovery plan.

If you don't have one, maybe it becomes the start of your disaster recovery plan. So, we want to make sure that we have all those people. Because the last thing you want to do is spin up a new network and realize that some critical service has been cut off.

I personally know of one instance where this happened. The service that was cut off were the lines that transmitted payroll to the payroll company, so everybody got paid. Kind of a loud oversight, right? We want to make sure those don't happen.

The other thing we want to do is make sure that we involve cybersecurity. For most of these providers, they do have some set of cybersecurity that runs on top of these. For some of these providers, it's included in their package, while some will run that on top of your own cybersecurity.

You have that double layer, if that's where you want to go, but again, you know you must make sure that you don't slow the network down. Figure out what your cybersecurity response is and how that's going to work.

Who's going to be responsible should there be an event? What services do they provide to you? Because if there's a place that you need to pick up and take over, those are things you need to know.

This needs to be coordinated with all your trainers and your technical support, because these are the people that are going to train your end users on how to use this network.

They'll make sure that everybody is signed in the correct way, and that we don't have smart users circumventing everything that we're trying to set up here with cybersecurity and access.

“How to Make Network Management Easier in 2024-2025” live virtual event on-demand today.