Networks are becoming the backbone of innovation that enable new mission and business capabilities, but legacy networks can no longer provide the flexibility to unleash possibilities of the future.  Especially during the turn of this decade, an increased demand for information flow, creation, curation, access and presentation changed the thinking around legacy networks dramatically. The concept of software defined networks (SDN) was born.

Presidio Federal proposes a Network as a Service (NaaS) Center of Excellence (COE) approach that includes both a change of SDN technology and a change in how future readiness is addressed.  In the future, readiness should be addressed through a fusion of mission capabilities, services, organizational, architecture, technology, management, security, processes, and operations. This is substantial transformation to envision, however a NaaS COE can show how to begin the transformation and then provide the road map forward to a full implementation – tailored to the client’s unique needs.

Maximizing Your WAN Investment

In the past, WANs were mostly static networks that could only transfer information with minimal awareness of the application, users, end points, bandwidth, performance, security and policy requirements to treat the information flow with any level of sophistication or automated intelligence. Before a transformation and major investment, legacy WANs need to be assessed for their current purpose, function and cost and evaluated to a new set of modern mission objectives. The most likely outcome of such an assessment is that current networks are not future ready nor compatible with the new mission objectives. Staying the course will inevitably lead to insurmountable operating expenses as legacy carriers will continue increasing their costs for maintaining outdated technology.

Modernizing a Wide Area Network (WAN) has never been more important. The communication patterns of business and government people, applications and end point devices are becoming radically different than in the past. Also, security, cost and reliability are major contributing factors in evaluating the future of WANs, but with a properly implemented NaaS these concerns can all be satisfied with equal or better service levels with greater security control and major cost reduction. Changes made now would be welcomed by all and save years of waste.

Conclusion

Starting a WAN modernization effort with a Network as a Service Center of Excellence framework can provide the decision data necessary for stakeholders to transform networks into intelligent information streams that enable new capabilities and foster innovation. The outcome of a NaaS COE is the framework and inception of a modern SDN with intelligent application aware routing and security under a zero-trust network architecture model.