The disruption the pandemic caused gave Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) offerings new relevance which is now driving unanticipated demand. Services like virtual private networking (VPN), bandwidth on demand (BoD), software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), content monitoring and filtering, custom routing, and security services can each be provided via means other than NaaS. But, NaaS has become a key enabler for all these services because it lets customers manage their services consumption in a shifting remote and hybrid work environment.
NaaS market to grow 7x in 7 years
According to Fortune Business Insights, the NaaS market is growing at a CAGR of nearly 32% and will grow from $11.6 billion in 2022 to more than $80 billion in 2029. Fortune cites common use case examples, such as retailers turning to NaaS to shift capacity from physical locations to online business, as key drivers of this growth. The report adds that enterprises have become accustomed to managing services and bandwidth per location, per platform, per application, and per user or employee as a result.
As enterprises adopt NaaS more, service providers need to scale their ability to deliver NaaS services massively and in step with closed-loop automation efforts. Fortunately, NaaS is designed for scale because while it incorporates substantial complexity, it does not pass the burden of that complexity onto operators or customers thanks to abstraction. NaaS decomposes and abstracts the heterogeneity of network, service, and cloud environments into domains, sub-domains, and functions that can be operated independently, but orchestrated as collectives to deliver specific services. This approach therefore relies on domain- and sub-domain automation to simplify the job and get it done continuously despite changes in available resources, parallel domains, or even in the management layer.
Zero-touch depends on domain management
Zero-touch service management is a central concept within NaaS, in the ETSI world. As ServiceNow’s Tom Schnarr describes in this helpful primer, ETSI defines the concept of management domains wherein each domain is responsible for its own inner workings and is not at all responsible for what happens in other domains or applications.
Any integration or interaction between domains is strictly handled by end-to-end service management, which sit across the top of multiple domains to coordinate requests and provide consistent service management across them all. Automating service delivery operations to support zero-touch automation across a range of services under the NaaS umbrella is not simple.
A substantial degree of complexity can and often does reside within any given domain. When CSPs have tried to tackle this challenge using traditional approaches, like custom-coded scripts to automate provisioning for static, it has not worked. Without abstraction and componentization, the custom code and integration work proves too brittle to change, too expensive to maintain, and troublesome to scale.
No-code enables zero-touch
Fast forward to today’s no-code approach, which leverages both abstraction and componentization, and zero-touch management and delivery of services within domains becomes readily attainable.
Intraway has shown the ability to automate service delivery in any service domain, including live automation demos on DIA over GPON, SD-WAN, Metro Area Networks and Ethernet E-Line, and 5G network slicing and more. Other common NaaS domains include mobile core, value added services applications, IoT platforms, and even SaaS-based third-party services, like video streaming and office productivity.
It is important for three key reasons that service providers have access to ready automation for any service or network domain:
Need to deploy and monetize faster
First, the end-to-end service management capabilities operators want that allow them to work toward greater levels of automation rely on highly effective domain management. Intraway has delivered the domain- and sub-domain management automation needed so that end-to-end service managers can pull integrated NaaS services together and add new service domains under the NaaS umbrella faster.
Must operate more efficiently and lower costs
Second, the economic advantage behind NaaS is that services are delivered to meet user-facing requirements, like capacity or latency, using the best available resources. Best in various contexts could mean cheapest, safest, most resilient, lowest latency, or best effort. This moves an operator away from static service provisioning and network over-provisioning to a more dynamic, fluid and predictive approach to network and cloud resource deployment and utilization.
When automated domain managers have the inherent flexibility, as Intraway’s Symphonica does, to instantiate or deliver against a service requirement using any available network, cloud, or application resource, it fulfills the agility, flexibility and cost efficiency promise NaaS offers to enterprise customers.
On the contrary, if domain management is delivered the old-fashioned way, with static, custom code, this core flexibility and economic advantage is not just lost but discarded entirely. Delivering NaaS without proven domain automation is a bit like inventing an automobile but putting a horse in the engine bay anyway.
Your domains called and said its time to automate
Automating domain management and orchestration with a cloud-native, no-code approach that utilizes proven deployment models and supports multiple standards and use cases will become the norm for deploying and scaling NaaS services.
To learn more about how Symphonica does it, contact us today.
