The reality of working in EdTech or municipal IT is that even if you have the capacity to set strategic networking goals, budget constraints are almost always an issue.
Though there have been some small year-over-year gains, CoSn’s 2024 Leadership Survey found that technology budgets account for just 5% of a school district’s overall budget for the majority (59%) of schools.
Small and mid-size municipalities face similar constraints, even as their network demand rapidly evolves. This is especially true for towns whose networks must be flexible and robust enough to instantly support large spikes in population and devices—whether from visiting tourists or college students and families.
For these networks, budget constraints trigger a domino effect that impacts consistency and reliability, while making it difficult to plan for and execute upgrades and refreshes as infrastructure ages and loses manufacturer support. And strain on already limited staff creates support issues and security risks, downtime risk, and a scenario where networks are far from supporting local business growth or more integrated, personalized learning.
Thankfully, a new model for network management called Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) now exists that helps in three crucial ways:
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NaaS makes municipal and education network more flexible,
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NaaS helps network managers scale, and
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NaaS brings budget certainty and operational excellence.
How NaaS Slashes Networking Capital Expenses
Traditionally, building, upgrading, and scaling network infrastructure requires significant capital spending. Hardware costs quickly pile up for Internet gateways, switches, and wireless routers. And then there are the software licenses. And it all happens within a four- to five-year cycle, where you’re looking at continuous budget-busting purchases every few years to keep pace with evolving technology, growing demand, and to simply replace old and worn-out devices that may no longer be supported by their manufacturers.
These large purchases can make it very difficult for schools and municipalities to plan and allocate budget—especially because the ways that these technologies change and advance aren’t entirely predictable.
In this way, network infrastructure ownership resembles home ownership: The costs don’t end with the initial purchases – once you 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.
By contrast, NaaS lets organizations “consume network infrastructure through flexible operating expense (OpEx) subscriptions, inclusive of hardware, software, management tools, licenses, and lifecycle services.”
In other words, NaaS is a complete package of services—including design, installation, configuration, testing, support, maintenance, and lifecycle—for connectivity infrastructure, without owning the physical infrastructure.
These flexible services agreements enable:
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Consistent long-term planning for your budget cycles,
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you to shift much of your IT budget to an operational expense, and
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all but eliminate large network capital expenses and incremental costs.
For schools and municipalities trying to navigate creating robust and reliable networks within budget constraints, this model can have a tremendous impact.
Across many rural communities, we’re seeing school districts faced with closing down multiple schools in the face of budget shortfalls. This is the tough, current reality, with far-reaching repercussions for those communities. One of our rural school district clients in Alaska, however, found that following their switch to Networking-as-a-Service, they were able to return some of those big budget infrastructure purchases and use those funds to reopen schools.
Yet another one of our clients came into a district where they had made a large network purchase in 2021. Now, as they are facing the need to refresh everything they had purchased within the next 24 months, the district is in a budget shortfall. By instead switching to NaaS, they’re able to refresh their infrastructure using E-Rate funds and allocate a predictable budget for the next one.
