Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024. Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The RISE of the Network-as-a-Service (NaaS)
By Khalid Raza, CEO and Founder, Graphiant
The public cloud (AWS, Azure, et al.) has revolutionized storage and compute for businesses. In 2024, NaaS will do the same for networking. The drivers of this trend are many:
- The number of things business networks need to connect has exploded (more sites, remote workers, edge locations, partners, customers, multiple clouds).
- Business transformation requires a new connection to happen much more quickly – in minutes, not weeks.
- Businesses have become accustomed to the no-CapEx pay-as-you-go economics of Cloud.
- A faster pace of business requires a much more elastic network (able to scale up and down quickly as business conditions change).
A Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) addresses these challenges. But it is a big change – are enterprise IT leaders ready? A 2023 survey says yes – that 7 of 8 say it is extremely likely they will switch to a NaaS.
Further, a true NaaS makes sense for service providers as well:
- Allows business expansion with very low capital (new geographies, new services, etc.)
- Moving to NaaS frees rack space for compute to differentiate the provider’s services
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Khalid Raza, CEO and Founder of Graphiant, was the co-founder and CTO of Viptela and is widely regarded as the “Father” of SD-WAN. He is a visionary in routing protocols and large-scale network architectures. In the past 25 years, he has redefined expectations and delivered innovative solutions across all industries for the Tier-1 carriers and Fortune 100 companies.
