For most organisations, digital transformation isn’t about disruption, it’s about survival. Companies that aren’t actively driving the automation of business processes, reduction of costs and customer experience improvements risk obsolescence. Realising the real-time enterprise is utterly dependent on being able to connect people, things and applications; securely and reliably. To be offline is to be dead in the water. Come rain or shine, pandemic or Black Friday, companies need to be able to create, gather, store and process data. And when things change, they need their infrastructure to adapt.
The ultimate goal is being able to consume connectivity “as a service”. Network as a Service (NaaS) isn’t a technology, it’s a model for the future of networking.
Automation is key to achieving NaaS, but it’s just one component. Successful NaaS also depends upon a fundamental shift in the approach to security. The leading candidate for this new security architecture is secure access service edge (SASE, pronounced “sassy”). It will also require fundamental changes to contracts, commercial models and business processes.