NaaS: Don't Put The Cart Before The Horse

At this past week’s “National Labs IT Conference” in Nashville, there were many conversations I witnessed and took part in surrounding the idea of “Network as a Service”.  While this isn’t necessarily a new idea, there’s been a significant uptick in the amount of presentations our Federal customers are seeing from solutions providers. These presentations have a few common themes that customers see parroted:

·     You can use operational monies

·     You can lock in long term budget / predictable IT spend

·     You can use it to lock in a solid lifecycle plan

·     You can bundle in services to manage the new infrastructure for “one low yearly payment”

For those of us that were in IT in the mid 00’s, none of this is new. We saw these same arguments get presented during the IT Outsourcing craze when IBM and HP were taking over the world and making lots of big promises. But the same two big problems still exist today:

·     The network better be architected correctly up front, because there’s no “going back to the well” once the contract is inked

·     Someone still has to *deliver* on those services

Don’t put the cart before the horse.  Customers understand that it is critical to first define where the problems are and streamline where they are at. They understand the importance of not grandfathering bad processes/procedures/architectures into any “as a Service” contract. This can be handled by Architects and PMO Staff by way of overlaying traditional six sigma principles. 

·     Define what we have (current infrastructure, tools, staffing levels, etc)

·     Dedicate a network red team to quickly deploy a good performance monitoring tool like NetBrain to gather real measurements of your current network. You cannot set forth realistic SLA goals without first understanding what your current state looks like

·      Analyze those current-state metrics and begin running analysis against those metrics; with a goal of finding the root cause of the deficiencies

·     Out of the gathered metrics and documented deficiencies, define real-world costs to achieve the desired SLA levels, and architect accordingly. This will tightly align IT and the Business in the process.

·     Develop Controls between IT and Business to Manage, Monitor, and Document the improvements… thus being ready the integration of a new architectural approach/model. 

Leverage and Cisco can help organizations step their way through these treacherous waters, in order to lay a solid foundation on which to build on. A properly architected network can deliver immediate ROI on the operations side of the house, from delivering zero-touch deployment, actionable insights, end to end visibility, remediation, enterprise-wide automation, and amazing built-in NOC capabilities. All from a single pane of glass, that we will continue exploring over the coming weeks.

#Cisco #Leverage #NaaS #ITaaS #NLIT2018 #XaaS #CiscoDNA #SecureCulture #NetworkArchitecture