This week, we're talking about NaaS.
Sure, we've covered NaaS in various contexts on TeleGeography Explains the Internet, but this episode focuses on fabric providers and where they're headed.
For that, we're so glad to have on our outspoken and super knowledgeable friend Michael Wynston, Director of Network Security Architecture & Automation at Fiserv.
Michael has now been on TeleGeography's podcast not once, not twice, but three times—and it's safe to say that he really knows his stuff.
What are fabric providers doing and how do they fit into the context of the traditional WAN? Alongside your typical MPLS-Internet hybrid network? As a replacement for some of that WAN? Listen to our conversation to find out.
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Key Takeaways
Benefits and Use Cases
NaaS addresses the challenges arising from the disaggregation of IT infrastructure due to moves to public cloud, IoT, and edge computing. It provides flexible, on-demand connectivity.
This is particularly valuable for dynamic workloads, data center replication, or connecting to various cloud and SaaS providers. The model shifts capital expenditures like buying routers or laying fiber to an operational expenditure model. This allows users to quickly adjust bandwidth based on need (scaling up or down), increasing the velocity for delivering new services and potentially saving money on unused capacity and infrastructure maintenance.
It also facilitates building global backbones or connecting assets across different continents more easily than managing numerous regional carrier contracts. A specific use case discussed is connecting edge compute locations directly to financial services providers or other partners via the fabric, rather than backhauling traffic through the enterprise's own data centers.
Position in the Ecosystem
While NaaS providers offer the foundational fabric, the broader NaaS landscape includes over-the-top (OTT) providers who build higher-layer services, such as global SD-WAN, on top of this underlying fabric infrastructure.
These OTT providers offer managed services for companies that may lack the internal expertise to build their own overlays. Public cloud providers also increasingly offer native connectivity options that can overlap with NaaS offerings.
The rise of NaaS presents a challenge to traditional MPLS carriers by potentially supplanting their business, but it also relies on their underlying physical network assets, creating a dynamic of competition and cooperation. Despite the abstraction, the underlying physical network infrastructure and the need for skilled network engineers remain critical.
Greg Bryan
Greg is Senior Manager, Enterprise Research at TeleGeography. He's spent the last decade and a half at TeleGeography developing many of our pricing products and reports about enterprise networks. He is a frequent speaker at conferences about corporate wide area networks and enterprise telecom services. He also hosts our podcast, TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
