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Enterprises today face an increasingly complex networking landscape. The rapid evolution of networking over the past two decades, driven by innovations like cloud services and generative AI, necessitates a fundamental shift in how organizations manage their network infrastructure.
Santander’s Chema San José explores the critical challenges posed by traditional network management and introduces Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) as a transformative solution, highlighting its benefits, core concepts, and key considerations for adoption.
Challenges in Traditional Network Infrastructure Management
Traditional network infrastructure presents significant hurdles for enterprises of all sizes. These challenges impede agility, scalability, and security, making it difficult for businesses to keep pace with evolving demands.
Key challenges include:
- Rapidly Changing Demands: The dynamic nature of business operations requires a highly adaptable network, which traditional setups often struggle to provide.
- Cloud Integration: Seamlessly connecting on-premises infrastructure with diverse cloud environments is a complex task.
- Security Management: Ensuring robust and consistent security across a distributed and evolving network is a constant battle.
- Global Network Management: Managing network infrastructure across multiple geographies adds layers of complexity in terms of compliance, performance, and oversight.
- Legacy System Integration: Integrating modern technologies with existing legacy systems often leads to operational inefficiencies and technical debt.
While large enterprises grapple with issues of scale and complex integration, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) often face limitations due to resource scarcity and technical expertise.
Network-as-a-Service: Simplifying Network Functions
Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) emerges as a powerful solution to these challenges. NaaS provides a cloud-based service that abstracts the complexity of network functions, allowing enterprises to redirect their focus from intricate device configurations to core business objectives. This service model leverages software-defined networking and security delivered in a cloud-based style, moving away from hardware-centric management.
Key aspects of NaaS include:
- Abstraction of Network Functions: NaaS abstracts complex network functionalities, particularly in interconnections and security, enabling enterprises to concentrate on business value rather than technical intricacies.
- Carrier Neutral Facilities (CNFs): The use of CNFs simplifies network connections and significantly improves scalability, facilitating easier expansion and contraction of network resources.
Benefits of Adopting Network-as-a-Service
The adoption of NaaS offers a multitude of benefits, enhancing operational efficiency, security, and the ability to innovate:
- Enhanced Flexibility and Scalability:
- NaaS can be easily scaled up or down as needed, providing the agility required to manage variable workloads.
- The use of APIs enables rapid scaling of connections, responding quickly to changing business requirements.
- Seamless Interoperability:
- NaaS facilitates interoperability across different providers, enabling seamless deployment across multi-cloud or hybrid environments.
- It necessitates uniform security protocols and encryption standards across multiple providers to maintain a consistent security posture.
- Strengthened Security Posture:
- NaaS simplifies security management, allowing enterprises to achieve a unified security posture.
- Service providers help mitigate data privacy concerns, a critical aspect for global companies.
- Operational Efficiency and Innovation:
- Enterprises can forget about hardware updates, as service providers take on the responsibility of managing the underlying infrastructure.
- Embedding advanced network capabilities like acceleration and real-time analysis directly into cloud-based platforms fosters faster innovation and real-time analytics.
- Sourcing network services from a diverse ecosystem of providers opens up possibilities for innovation and cost reduction.
- Cost-Effective Management:
- A hybrid approach, combining on-demand and subscription-based models, is considered the most effective for enterprises. This allows for better cost negotiation, efficient variable workload management, and optimal scalability.
- This approach requires balancing cost predictability, productivity, stability, and usage patterns.
- Enabling AI Integration:
- AI and generative AI necessitate more scalable and low-latency network infrastructure, a requirement perfectly addressed by NaaS.
- NaaS opens up significant opportunities for automation within the network, and AI could potentially evolve into a “co-pilot” for network management.
Key Considerations for NaaS Adoption and Cultural Shift
While the benefits are clear, successful NaaS adoption requires strategic planning and a significant cultural shift within organizations.
- Prioritize Interoperability and Standardization: When selecting NaaS providers, interoperability and standardization are paramount to ensure seamless integration and future flexibility.
- Embrace a Hybrid Approach: The discussion points to a hybrid approach combining on-demand and subscription models as the best option for balancing cost, flexibility, and scalability.
- Address Data Privacy: For global companies, data privacy concerns are critical, and providers must demonstrate robust solutions to mitigate these risks.
- Foster a Cultural Transformation:
- A fundamental cultural shift within companies is necessary, moving away from a focus on managing technicalities to prioritizing service capabilities that deliver tangible business value.
- This transformation necessitates training programs and a change in skill sets, shifting from traditional network management tools to automation tools.
- The role of IT teams evolves to managing these services, empowering smaller enterprises to compete effectively with larger organizations by leveraging advanced capabilities without extensive in-house infrastructure.
The Role of Mplify
Mplify contributes to accelerating the adoption of NaaS by uniting technology providers, service providers, and enterprises around common standards and certifications that ensure interoperability, trust, and scalability. For organizations like Santander Digital Services navigating the shift to cloud-based networking and AI-driven infrastructures, Mplify offers tangible value in the following ways:
- Certification and Validation: Through its Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) API and SASE Certification Programs, Mplify provides third-party validation of interoperability and performance. This allows enterprises to confidently select providers that meet rigorous, standardized criteria for automation, security, and service delivery.
- Ecosystem Enablement: By fostering collaboration across carriers, cloud platforms, software vendors, and managed service providers, Mplify helps align ecosystem players to deliver seamless NaaS experiences across multi-vendor environments.
- API-Driven Interoperability: Mplify’s focus on LSO APIs enables service providers to rapidly scale network services, integrate with AI platforms, and reduce time-to-value for enterprise customers through automation and programmability.
- Innovation Acceleration: With standardized frameworks and certification programs, Mplify helps reduce integration complexity, allowing enterprise IT teams to focus on innovation, analytics, and automation rather than vendor-by-vendor integration challenges.
Mplify helps the industry to move from fragmented, proprietary approaches to a standardized, service-oriented model supporting faster adoption of NaaS and AI while driving operational excellence and customer trust.
Conclusion
Network-as-a-Service represents a strategic imperative for modern enterprises. By abstracting network complexities and delivering functionalities as a flexible, scalable, and secure cloud-based service, NaaS enables organizations to focus on innovation, achieve operational excellence, and effectively integrate emerging technologies like AI, all while optimizing costs and enhancing their competitive posture.
Learn More
- About Mplify for Enterprises.
- About Mplify’s vision for NaaS and get the NaaS Industry Blueprint.
- Download the Mplify NaaS Customer Experience White Paper.
- Join us at Mplify’s next Global NaaS Event
