Q&A with Nick Perry.
As businesses grapple with increasing network complexity and security threats, Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) is quickly emerging as a cost-effective solution to these common challenges. We caught up with Nick Perry, Lexel’s Network and Security Consultant, to discuss how you can transform your business with NaaS in 2021 and beyond.
Q: What are the main challenges you see businesses facing with their wireless and local networks?
Nick: The ever-increasing pressure to ensure network connectivity is always on; reliability of network service is one of the biggest challenges businesses are currently facing. Often customers are finding t internal IT capability is overwhelmed with the speed of change in this area and cannot deliver what the business demands. Resulting in either a bad user experience or massive security vulnerabilities, exposing their business data to the world.
Down-time for key applications and business systems is a serious issue. It ultimately means the business can’t operate and their expensive resources can’t work efficiently. Uninterrupted connectivity is particularly crucial for 24×7 businesses because they need a team of on-call network engineers to resolve any major incidents.
Security is another key challenge for organisations. We’ve seen this recently with various businesses and hospitals having sensitive customer data leaked onto the dark web. With new data privacy laws in NZ, this can severely impact the public image of a business, so it’s important to have comprehensive network security in place. Spending a few hundred dollars a month more on a secure, high availability service can ensure you get the maximum value out of your most expensive resource, their people.
Q: So what is NaaS and how does it protect businesses from the network vulnerabilities and threats of today?
Nick: Lexel’s NaaS provides its customers with best-in-class networking hardware, combined with best practice deployment (including ISPs), ongoing maintenance, 24×7 support and upgrades. Lexel has a team of network professionals that are experts in their field, industry certified and on-call, to proactively maintain and prevent network outages and breaches. Should an outage occur, our NZ-based specialist team is available to assist at any time, any day.
Q: How does NaaS help address other common business challenges?
Nick: For any business, the expense of having a team of full-time experienced staff that need to be continually trained and available, on call, is a big one. Good staff can be hard to hire in the current market and are often a single point of failure if they get sick or leave the company. Networking is Lexel’s day-to-day bread and butter and outsourcing to our experts allows you to focus on other areas of growing your business.
Network down-time can result in huge loss of revenue for any business, particularly if it can’t continue to process manufacturing, ship products or communicate effectively with customers. Additionally, NaaS resolves problems by scaling up easily without huge capital expenditure. Likewise scaling down can be done without the risk of hardware getting dusty and not being used.
At Lexel, NaaS solutions are built from the ground up with customers’ real-world challenges in mind. We’ve worked with dozens of customers who face similar challenges in an ever-changing world, post COVID-19. We will take care of all the hardware refresh issues, security updates, backups and support for you, so your team can focus on your core business.
Q: What considerations are there for a business to transition to NaaS?
Nick: There are a number of key pillars to be considered, including what hardware to buy, the best ISP options and who is going to make it all connect together. Lexel’s NaaS takes care of the ‘end-to-end’ network experience for customers. Providing a single number to call if a site needs to be added or if a user needs networking assistance. Dealing with industry experts who will remove all the noise for you is one of the key deliverables for our customers. For businesses who want to focus on their core offering, the RoI on Lexel’s NaaS is a given.
Q: What advice would you give a business that’s considering making the move to NaaS?
Nick: I’d recommend connecting with our team to discuss your needs. Our experts will help you to understand the solution and how it fits with your desired outcomes.
Are you thinking about taking your network to the next level with our NaaS solution? Contact us now.
