Many small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) don't have dedicated IT departments. Even when they do, today's IT departments are under pressure to do more with less: manage more sites and clients with limited budgets and even more limited staff. Stretched beyond their lifespans and breaking points mean network downtime and higher support costs for existing in-house networks.
Think about this - most phone systems now use VoIP (voice over IP); who and how do you call when a Network goes down? Who do you call for help when your network and phones are down the Ghostbusters? With regular business expansions and contractions, managing disparate network equipment becomes time, and labor-intensive, so in-house networks can steal resources from other strategic technology and marketing initiatives. And if you read "resources" as money, then you've traveled this "networks are expensive and difficult to maintain" road too.
The high cost of enterprise WAN (wide area network) connectivity, security, support, and personnel, forces many network admins to search for ways to keep their systems up, running, and protected. Add the growth of bandwidth-hungry streaming apps and cloud-based services, and replacing in-house networks with Network as a Service (NaaS) is essential.
NaaS packages networking resources, services, and applications as a product purchased for X users for a period of Y time. NaaS services from third parties such as WTE partner CBTS provides managed networks for customers that don't want or can't build and manage expensive, tempermental, and resource hungry in-house networking infrastructure. NaaS is a cloud service model renting networking services from cloud providers. Your data needs to go places and do things, and you network needs to accept and process information. Information flows across the Internet using one of two models - OSI and TCP/IP.
The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Model describes how data flows across the Internet via seven layers, each layer prepping data for transmission. Here are the seven layers of the OSI model working from the bottom up.
Application HTTP is the primary protocol used in the application layer.
Presentation Data gets translated so applications can accept with some assigning HTTPS encryption and decryption happening here.
Session The session layer controls connections between computers.
Transport Computers transmit data while controlling service quality in the transport layer with TCP and UDP as the main protocols.
Network Data has to go somewhere, so the network layer routes and sends data between networks with IP and ICMP as the main protocols.
Data link The data link layer manages communications between devices with ethernet as the primary protocol.
Physical Data packets, the bits, and bytes of your information, get converted into electrical, radio, or optical pulses for transmission over wires, radio waves, or cables at the physical layer.
The Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol or TCP/IP model provides an alternative model for how data flows across the Internet. TCP/IP has four layers instead of OSI's seven. Here are TCP/IP's four layers working bottom up.
Application Similar to OSI's applicaiton layer.
Transport Similar to the transport layer in OSI.
Internet Similar to the Network layer in OSI.
Network Access Combines physical and data link OSI layers.
We share this level of detail to make a point. Something we take for granted, moving information between users, networks, and computers is complicated, can be fragile, and is expensive.
Network as a Service (NaaS) from WTE partners such as CBTS provides a cost-saving scalable alternative to supporting, maintaining, expanding, and securing an in-house computer network. NaaS makes possible fully managed networking solutions with cloud integration, security, switching, Wi-Fi, management, monitoring, and SD-WAN (software-defined networking in a WAN). NaaS delivers support features to address unique customer needs, including:
Watch this short CBTS video about NaaS benefits.