Last year started off on an optimistic note. In January, Gartner predicted that global IT spending would increase by 3.4% compared to 2019. Many organizations were expected to upgrade outdated legacy hardware. However, the pandemic forced organizations to rethink long term strategies. Gartner now predicts an 8% decline in IT spending as most organizations are gravitating towards cloud-based software-as-a-service offerings. The SaaS market segment is forecasted to grow to $104.7 billion and beyond. As enterprises and service providers aggressively embrace a hybrid multi-cloud strategy, network automation will evolve from an inflexible, on-premise model to a more agile “as a service” model.
Nikhil
Vyakaranam
Product Line
Manager, Anuta
Networks
This year should usher a significant increase in Network-Automation-as-a-service offerings globally as organizations temper their security paranoia and embrace the benefits of SaaS. Consequently, the following factors should accelerate the adoption of Network Automation as a service.
#1: Reduced Installation and Maintenance Costs
According to a recent report, an astounding 3/4s of teams spend more than half of their time just maintaining networks. Organizations are continually pursuing ways to redirect precious time and effort expended on mundane assignments to more challenging and productive tasks. SaaS applications enable such transitions by outsourcing installation and maintenance functions and thereby reducing the total cost of ownership. Network management utilities are usually the primary movers to SaaS as proven by the plethora of successful SaaS-based network monitoring solutions. Network automation, on the other hand, is yet to capitalize on this growing service-based offering. Adoption of network automation has also traditionally been sluggish due to significant upfront investments related to installation, personnel, training, and other considerations. These further clouds the ability to determine business ROI. SaaS offerings are powerful in that they eliminate capital expenditure risks and enable network teams to determine and realize ROI faster.
#2: Crowd-Sourced Analytics and Customized Suggestions
Network analytics has primarily focused on collecting, processing, and visualizing current and historical data from a single network. The collected data is consumed by complex artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to predict future trends and prescribe improvements. Organizations, large and small, are not just keen to improve their current process but are also eager to adopt best practices. Software-as-a-service platforms can collect anonymized statistics from several networks, and provide customized suggestions based on the data processed from similar and dissimilar networks. Subsequently, crowdsourced analytics enable organizations to derive faster value from their networks by leveraging insights from the operations of other organizations.
#3: Immediate Access to Innovation
Organizations are often tentative to upgrade their automation platform to the latest release. Upgrades entail complex and tedious procedures to avoid service loss and security vulnerabilities. As a result, organizations often prefer to skip intermediate releases to avoid commitment of time and resources to non-essential tasks. Not only does this approach make subsequent upgrades daunting, but it also results in not leveraging various innovative features and security updates. The SaaS approach eliminates this phenomenon by outsourcing incremental upgrades to a third party thereby enabling organizations to stay abreast of the latest and greatest features.
#4: Scale as you Grow
Enterprises and Service Providers endeavor to maintain and grow their networks to provide novel use cases and delightful user experiences. Automation is predominantly used as a facilitator to scale up or down a given network as required. The scaling of the automation solution itself is seldom a core focus area and usually translates into an additional burden for IT staffs. In contrast, network-automation-as-a-service allows organizations to consume automation as needed without agonizing over the challenges related to scaling and geographical distribution.
In light of the pandemic, there is a heightened interest in network automation as a service. In the past, organizations were apprehensive of SaaS solutions. Security of network data, reliability of service provisioning, latency, and visualization were chief concerns. However, the new normal has prompted service providers and enterprises to think differently.
In conclusion, the benefits of SaaS-based network automation are numerous - higher quality of connectivity, less downtime through faster remediation, easier device provisioning, and a more consistent user application experience. Strict adherence to compliance standards such as SOC2, PCI, HIPAA will also result in newfound confidence in the security aspects of cloud-delivered solutions. As a result, network-automation-as-a-service is poised to take off in a dramatic fashion this year.
