Glossary

Cloud Network-as-a-Service is an IT model where customers pay a subscription to operate the network they need. Like other “as-a-Service” solutions, NaaS allows businesses to rent services, outsourcing IT infrastructure to others without maintaining their own hardware. Vendors provide network functionality using software, meaning all companies need to add is connectivity.

This new way of thinking about enterprise IT brings with it many upsides. Listed below are the top five NaaS benefits for companies and the top five reasons operators need to get in on the action, offering their customers the modern networks they want

To learn more, read our Blog about The Top 5 NaaS Benefits for Improved Network Performance and Security

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is the practice of running network functions, such as firewalls, NAT, and load balancers, as software applications on virtual machines (VMs). This allows for greater flexibility and agility in network operations, as well as the ability to scale network functions more easily.

Traditionally, NFV has been implemented by deploying VNFs on a hypervisor, such as VMware vSphere or OpenStack. The VNFs are then stitched together by an orchestrator, such as OpenStack Heat or Kubernetes, to create a chain of services in a network.

InsidePacket’s solution takes this approach even further by virtualizing the functions themselves and applying them directly to the data plane of the solution. This removes the need to chain services, and allows for more efficient and scalable network

Network segmentation is a feature of a NaaS (Network as a Service) solution that allows enterprise customers to group and name connections into different segments of their network.

If using a NaaS solution, benefits of network segmentation are :

• Improved security: Network segmentation can help to prevent unauthorized access to data and resources.
• Improved performance: Network segmentation can help to improve network performance by reducing the amount of traffic that needs to be routed.
• Improved manageability: Network segmentation can help to simplify network management by making it easier to identify and troubleshoot problems.

In InsidePacket NaaS solution, interfaces can even belong to multiple segments at once. This allows for greater flexibility and control over how traffic is routed. Communication can be controlled based on segments, both within segments and between segments.

For example, you could create a segment for all of your web servers, and another segment for all of your database servers. You could then configure the firewall to only allow traffic between these two segments. This would help to protect your web servers from attacks that originate from your database servers.

You could also create a segment for all of your users in the United States, and another segment for all of your users in Europe. You could then configure the firewall to only allow traffic between these two segments. This would help to improve performance by reducing the amount of traffic that needs to be routed between the two regions.