In today’s fast-paced business environment, agility and flexibility are essential. Network as a Service provides businesses with the flexibility to adapt to changing business needs, without being held back by the limitations of traditional network infrastructure. NaaS acts as a personal IT department, available on demand to scale up or down the network infrastructure, customise network services, or ensure the security of data. As an essential tool to stay ahead of competition, NaaS plays a key role and has gained popularity.
Morten Illum, EMEA Vice President and Jacob Chacko, Regional Director – Middle East, Saudi & South Africa, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, elaborate on the gaining popularity of NaaS in today’s context.
The gaining popularity for NaaS
Consumers prefer to spend more time on innovation than on operations. It can be difficult to plan the network and keep up with change as device counts rise, endpoints become more varied, and connectivity requirements rise. For the organisation to operate more effectively, cloud agility, security, scale, compliance, automation, and AI are required.
“Network-as-a-Service Brings Flexibility to the Edge. It includes data analytics, expanded telemetry, artificial intelligence, and automation – which combine to deliver critical efficiency gains in network operations. With network management increasingly complex in the new age of remote working, replacing manual interventions with advanced automation and analytics also provides increased visibility from a security perspective,” said Illum.
“Ultimately enterprises are increasingly favouring NaaS offerings as it allows them to outsource the hardware and software components of their networks to a partner to take on the more mundane tasks, enabling their employees to focus on mission-critical, business-enabling work. Overall, NaaS increases operational efficiencies which reducing costs,” he added.
Unique NaaS offering
Mortem said that the company doesn’t have an ‘Aruba only’ model. Aruba delivers the framework as a foundation and then depending on the customer’s unique requirements, the partners add bespoke services to the framework in order to deliver the required capabilities.
“Our NaaS solution is really about foundational NaaS capabilities. It is a framework coupled with the financial model and basic support and AI capabilities that we offer our partners who in turn deliver customized solutions to their end customers so that enterprises can consume the network as they consume the cloud – which is really what NaaS is,” said Illum.
With the growing popularity of NaaS in the region, the Middle East and Africa market represent tremendous potential for the company and Jacob Chacko and Morten Illum takes the lead in driving business, converting more customers and cornering a larger market share.
“Today we see a distinct move towards outcome-driven discussions, which is a sign of maturity of the market. It is no longer about telling customers that we provide networking products. Rather, it’s more about what business outcomes organizations in every industry can drive with Aruba. We have RFPs today that at a high-level look like networking RFPs but talk about building a highway for IoT. This transformation that we are currently witnessing in the networking industry is overwhelming. And it’s absolutely welcome. It completely resonates with our strategy and we are well poised to assist customers in their digital transformation journey,” said Chacko.
