Digital technology is transforming how organisations operate by boosting the speed, effectiveness and resilience of their apps and business processes. By automating tasks, it can help organisations work more effectively. The latest wave of digital innovation powered by AI and machine learning goes even further.

With applications such as predictive analytics, organisations can strengthen the security and resilience of their systems and processes by spotting IT incidents before they can disrupt performance. 

The cloud is the workhorse of digital transformation. It offers capacity on tap to process and store the vast volumes of data organisations now create and consume and it helps turn it into actionable insight. 

When thinking about the cloud, it is important to realize that there isn’t just one type of cloud but many, and there are several different cloud service providers.

The largest public cloud providers are known as hyperscalers. These include Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. They offer services publicly and in many countries to organisations of all industries and sizes. They operate enormous data centres offering huge amounts of capacity.

Many organisations continue to run their own data centres for a variety of reasons, from security or regulatory requirements to the need to maximise the return on capital invested. These are known as private clouds. 

There’s edge cloud too: individual servers located on sites such as an organisation’s offices, factories or depots. These might be used to aggregate data from local sensors before feeding it in bulk to central, large cloud facilities.

Many organisations now have a hybrid cloud estate, dispersing data and digital workloads across both private and public clouds and among various cloud service providers. 

This enables them to benefit from best-in-class capabilities but creates a complex mix of infrastructure for IT teams to manage as they try to strike the best balance of apps performance, cost, user experience, regulatory compliance and cyber security.

Traditional corporate networks were not built for this. They were designed at a time when almost all an organisation’s people tended to be based in offices and other corporate buildings and all their applications and data were stored in a handful of their own privately operated data centres. This site-to-site connectivity– from office to data centre– was relatively simple. 

Today, people and devices could be connecting from anywhere, accessing apps and data spread across multiple clouds. 

Piling on pressure further still is the surge in data volumes expected from AI and the accelerating number of smart, Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices organisations now use.

Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) offers a new approach to connectivity. Designed specifically for multi-cloud, it makes it easy for organisations to view and control how their digital workloads move across multiple clouds, out to users and devices and then back again. 

It’s like having a virtual toolbox that enables you to adapt your network to suit your needs, providing the flexibility and control to pick the best performing, most resilient and compliant routes for your digital workloads. 

NaaS makes use of AI and machine learning to offer unprecedented automation, meaning connections that previously could have taken weeks to provision can now be set up in an instant.

Like the public cloud, NaaS is pay-as-you-use, meaning costs can be tied directly to the organisation’s demands. 

Moreover, NaaS replaces expensive traditional network setups that require dedicated hardware– such as port, access and customer premise equipment (CPE) for each network service– with a shared, easily scalable infrastructure. 

This network infrastructure enhances efficiency and reduces total cost of ownership by supporting automated provisioning and near real-time in-life management of services. 

It also allows multiple types and bandwidth of connectivity services on the same shared hardware, providing the flexibility to achieve the best total bandwidth allocation on demand.

Would you walk into unknown, possibly hostile territory with no idea of the risks you might face? I’m sure you wouldn’t, so why do it with your data? 

NaaS is deterministic. This means you can choose the routes your workloads take as they move between clouds and out to users. For example, with standard internet connectivity, organisations have little control over the routes their traffic takes. It could pass through national networks controlled by adversaries or where security is known to be lax. 

With NaaS, organisations can effectively geofence their traffic, keeping it within the borders of relevant jurisdictions and out of hostile territory. 

NaaS can boost application performance and resilience too. With an end-to-end view of how each application’s workloads are moving between clouds, routes can be monitored and optimised in near real-time. 

BT’s new NaaS, Global Fabric, seamlessly integrates global coverage, dense metro architecture– which means it has at least two Points of Presence (PoPs) in each metro zone boosting resilience– and software-defined intent-based routing. This combination delivers a resilient, high-performance network that easily adapts to changing conditions and optimises traffic flows to meet specific requirements. 

Designed with a high-capacity core, with multiple 100 Gbps connections into major cloud locations globally, offering in-built resilience, Global Fabric handles large volumes of data or traffic easily.

It also provides real-time historical performance metrics that enable organisations to smoothly manage and optimise the performance and reliability of in-life mission-critical applications. By using continuous tracking, and analysing metrics such as latency, jitter and packet loss, it protects the health of an organisation’s end-to-end application environment.

In the past, it’s been too easy for apps and clouds teams to overlook the importance of connectivity choices when deploying their new digital services. But as digital transformation accelerates and workloads shift from private data centres into the cloud, this will no longer be the case. The networks team needs a seat at the table. With the help of NaaS, they can help ensure your digital transformation is resilient and a success.