Network as a Service: Using SD-WAN to supercharge an Azure environment

Network as a Service (NWaaS) is becoming an increasingly popular IT option with organisations looking to benefit from a combination of Cloud, SD-WAN and security technology. Businesses with a footprint in Azure are embracing NWaaS because of the ability to build on their investment whilst enhancing security, visibility, and performance across the entire environment.

When Networks met Azure

Essentially, NWaaS is a customisable collection of services and applications located across a combination of Cloud and on-premises. It is especially relevant for organisations with multiple sites that rely on WAN and MPLS solutions. The solution takes the best parts of on-prem (reliability) and pairs it with the best parts of Cloud (efficiency) to provide an affordable, fast, scalable, and intelligent infrastructure.

By embracing NWaaS, organisations can enhance their services and make improvements across the board. At Azured, we combine three powerful components; Palo Alto’s firewalls, VMWare’s SD-WAN by VeloCloud and Microsoft Azure to enable businesses to achieve new network and environment heights. Specifically, this trio of tech delivers evolutionary benefits across four key pillars.

#1: Security

By building on a business’ foundational security layer in Azure, NWaaS enhances and extends security posture within an environment using SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) principles. For example, business risk can be significantly reduced by leveraging ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Architecture) and minimising potential attack surface area. To learn more about the benefits of SASE, check out our recent blog, Traditional network security to SASE and beyond.  

#2: Reach and Performance

NWaaS extends network reach and elevates application performance via it’s Microsoft Azure and SD WAN (namely, the VeloCloud Orchestrator) service components. This intelligent technology optimises the delivery of application services both within public cloud and private networks. It also enables Global Transit, connecting international sites at a speed comparable to that of a private network.

#3: Cost-efficient scalability

By leveraging Pay as You Grow components, NWaaS enables customers to incrementally enhance their network environment. Organisations can add and remove connections depending on user and application performance needs, without the complexity of standard network deployment. NWaaS turns around new deployments from months to days.

#4: Visibility

All businesses benefit from greater visibility across their IT, data and systems. NWaaS delivers enhanced visibility across an environment via the VeloCloud Orchestrator and My.Azured. Businesses will be able to pinpoint issues to remediate within their environment in record time, whilst enabling proactive management and response to situations before they become a problem.

Unlocking new opportunities

By embracing NWaaS, not only does the solution simplify your IT, it also opens up new opportunities to explore within your environment.

If your organisation needs to be confident it has the highest service availability, NWaaS’ reliable connection ensures access to critical apps whenever needed. Meanwhile, the scalability offered by the solution means you can configure your infrastructure to meet your needs, adapting it as your organisation changes.

Our NWaaS solution also comes with an application performance guarantee to ensure a consistent and positive experience for users. Key metrics enable you to have full transparency across the service, to easily identify any issues and continuously improve the security and performance of the network.

With so many benefits, it’s easy to see why NWaaS is an in-demand solution. If you are keen to explore how your organisation might benefit from NWaaS, please get in touch directly to learn more.

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