NaaS: Where it is and where it’s going

After five years of trials and deployments, communications service providers (CSPs) have reached a good measure of success in implementing network-as-a-service (NaaS). Few if any implementations, however, are exploiting the full promise of NaaS, which is to chain together service components end to end across domains and assure and reconfigure them dynamically based on a customer’s business requirements.

To implement the full vision – and indeed to move beyond NaaS to achieve the goal of agile, ubiquitous connected solutions – CSPs need to step back, consider what role they want to play in the evolving digital communications marketplace, then refresh their partnership and technology strategies. CSPs’ business customers have realized the benefits of better and quicker service delivery and more self-service control, while the operators have gained agility and efficiency.

However, operators using NaaS as a service delivery framework have stopped short of truly abstracting the network from operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) and inviting partners onto their NaaS platforms because of technology limitations and concerns about performance and security. They provide an “inside out”, curated and pre-integrated process for service ordering and management rather than an “outside in” catalog of service elements that they can compose automatically in near real time based on a customer’s business intent.

Read this report to understand:

• What NaaS is and the benefits it provides CSPs and their customers
• How Orange, TELUS, Verizon and Vodafone are implementing NaaS, and what their future plans are beyond NaaS
• Why CSPs need to look ahead and plan for connectivity-as-a-service (CaaS)
• What it will take to implement CaaS