How Municipal and School IT Leaders Can Leverage NaaS Partnerships to Build Capacity and Their Careers

In the realm of technology and IT leadership, municipalities, K-12 schools, and even community colleges have a lot in common. For starters, your networks are some of the most complex there are. On limited budgets, you must be able to support immense influxes in demand in an instant. Multiple types of devices are constantly connecting, disconnecting, moving, and reconnecting in new locations throughout the day. And your networks need to be able to level out and maintain consistent service across wide areas, even as you see spikes in bandwidth demand and media use.

You’re also constantly being asked to do more with less, which has stretched your IT team to — and perhaps beyond — their capacity.

Even just a few years ago, it may have been feasible to manage all your network hardware and software in-house. For schools, you probably supported a few desktop computers in each classroom, some Smart Boards, and helped teachers slowly integrate more media types into their lesson plans. For municipalities, your cellular networks might have tackled routine population ebbs and flows from tourists or college students and families.

But as you know, with the pandemic and technology use rapidly accelerating in our daily lives, everything has changed.

Networks Have Changed—But There’s a New Model That Helps

The volume of devices connecting to and in use on your networks, the types of media they’re streaming, and the bandwidth they’re consuming has exploded. Network management is all of a sudden, much more than a full-time job.

Which means you and your staff are now spending all your time in reactive mode: responding to issues, repairing devices, fielding complaints about slow Wi-Fi, and otherwise fighting fires.

Network management like this is no longer a good use of your time, and stretching your capacity in this way may even be leading to missed maintenance and other issues that risk compounding down the road.

In fact, working with the right external partner for Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) can instead empower and strengthen technology and IT staff, expand team members’ knowledge and experience, and help them grow in their career.

One of the most valuable ways a NaaS partner does this is by giving you and your team capacity—capacity to learn, but also capacity to create new, larger, and more strategic goals, achieve them, and build new skills and expertise.

Let’s take a look.

The Hidden Costs of a Traditional Networking Model

With network infrastructure ownership, it’s a little like home ownership. You don’t only own the devices and the software licenses. You also own the care, upkeep, and maintenance of them, throughout their entire lifecycle—and on through the transition to the next. It requires a great deal of time and planning to:

Install and configure devices
Monitor for and apply updates and software patches to address security vulnerabilities and technology changes
Support, service, and resolve issues
Maintain network documentation
Maintain infrastructure, including performing device checks and dusting filters
Backup data and configurations
Maintain device and software inventories
Scope and budget for upgrades every few years to meet growing demand and as technology rapidly advances
Securely de-commission and recycle end-of-life hardware

Managing upgrades, refreshes, and the technology lifecycle in general is particularly challenging with an ownership model, as technology is not always predictable. While you can assume it will change, it’s not always clear exactly how.

Not to mention, the Capital Expenditure (CapEx)-intensive nature of traditional network ownership makes carving out budget for regular upgrades difficult.

Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) Frees Up IT Teams

NaaS, on the other hand, is a complete package of services—including design, installation, configuration, testing, support, maintenance, and lifecycle—for connectivity infrastructure, without owning the physical infrastructure. Designed to enable organizations of all kinds to “consume network infrastructure through flexible operating expense (OpEx) subscriptions,” flexible services agreements enable consistent long-term planning for your budget cycles and all but eliminate large network capital expenses and incremental costs.

This greatly simplifies how you consume and manage your network infrastructure, while enhancing security and providing greater flexibility and scalability. For a manageable, predictable cost, it helps you maximize your limited resources and create newfound capacity for IT leaders and staff alike.

Through NaaS, you can shift essential network maintenance, troubleshooting, repairs, and support, and essentially every time-consuming task we mentioned above to your external partner.

This has compounding benefits: by ensuring your network is on a regular, consistent maintenance cadence, you decrease the risk of maintenance-related downtime and security vulnerabilities and have a team to identify and handle issues proactively—before they become larger.

A NaaS partner can also help you assess any hardware or software features you’re not using with your current devices that you could benefit from—helping you maximize the ROI on your current network infrastructure.

You not only gain time and capacity back through offloading network management work, but you also reduce the amount of time your staff is pulled in to fight fires and manage repairs, especially as you’re able to consistently refresh hardware to newer, more up-to-date and still supported devices.

A Co-managed Approach Can Help You Build Skills + Knowledge

Your NaaS partnership should truly be a partnership: a collaboration that is co-managed together. The team you outsource networking to can help you dream, plan for, and execute networking solutions to inspire creativity, innovation, and inspired learning within your classrooms and communities.

While you bring your own insight from your end users, you can lean on them to be experts on new and emerging technology, lead testing, prototypes, execution, and analysis, and to bring ideas from their work with other schools and municipalities.

Technology changes quickly, and depending on the devices, hardware has lifespans of between three and five years. Allowing them to manage vendor and partner relationships and advise and guide you on the best fit for your needs and goals frees you up to lean into your strengths and be the expert in the other parts of your job. It gives you the capacity to develop larger, strategic goals and actually move them forward.

But a NaaS partner also provides knowledge transfer on the new technology for you and your staff. This helps save on training costs, and also helps you learn and grow professionally, gaining experience and mentorship that can be tricky to access in education and municipal fields, so you can ultimately advance your career with new skills and expertise.

Final Thoughts

Just think about being able to turn those complaints about Wi-Fi into excitement from teachers who can finally trust the Wi-Fi enough to reliably plan integrative lessons, with inclusive technology for their students. Or the ability to provide a robust, reliable network for visitors to your town, and your local businesses who depend on them. Or what it would mean for you and your staff, no matter your size, to have something freed up off your plate, while gaining cost-effective access to a team of wired and wireless networking experts. All the while you still maintain control of and visibility into your IT infrastructure, as well as all decision-making.

It’s normal to feel worried or afraid that bringing in an outside networking expert will jeopardize you or your staff’s jobs or expose gaps in skills and knowledge. But when you work with the right NaaS partner, who understands municipal and school networks, they’re truly there to support you, build you up, and help you create reliable, secure, and powerful networks that ultimately enable you and your users’ bigger strategic goals.

Ready to Learn More About NaaS?

Download our guide, How to Transform Your K-12 School and Municipal Networks with Network-as-a-Service, to learn how NaaS helps maximize budget, build excellence, and create capacity for stretched IT teams—including how K-12 schools can fund a NaaS partnership through the federal E-Rate program.