GÉANT Network Management as a Service (NMaaS)

Why do users need NMaaS?

Today’s network services are complex with heterogeneous network infrastructures and increasing numbers of value added services and features. Services are becoming increasingly mission critical for end users and the need to provide an integrated view of Network and Service Management will become vital.

The cost and complexity of developing and integrating in-house network management may be too high for many NRENs and institutions. NMaaS aims to support these users to provide an effective, efficient network and service management platform.

What does NMaaS Offer?

Network Management as a Service (NMaaS) provides a portfolio of network management applications run on a per-user, secured network monitoring infrastructure.

GÉANT’s NMaaS service includes three aspects:

Providing, managing and maintaining the infrastructure of the NMaaS service portal, platform and selected tools.
Supporting users in using the system, and the selected tools for monitoring their networks via NMaaS.
Supporting users that contribute their software to the NMaaS system.

NMaaS users are organisations that do not want to own NMS infrastructure themselves and/or want to outsource network management, as well as organisations and/or individuals that are searching for quality network management software or who want to share their software within the community. NMaaS provides multiple benefits, as a system, an application marketplace, and as a service.

NMaaS simplifies domain network management by providing the infrastructure and tools via a cloud-based, multi-tenant and secure network management system. It enables the deployment of network management tools, as well as management and monitoring of client networks, although NMaaS does not monitor and manage the network by itself.

The selection of tools that is and/or can be made available to users is not limited to network management tools and can be easily extended. With NMaaS, users do not have to bear the ownership costs and risks related to maintenance and control of the network management infrastructure.

Using a multi-tenant approach, each NREN or institution has private access to their network and services from a highly available cloud based platform

Who is NMaaS for?

NMaaS has been designed to be as flexible as possible to support a wide range of use cases including:

Small and Emerging NRENs
Smaller NRENs may have limited resources to develop their own network management systems.

By using a shared and supported platform, NRENs can focus on the monitoring and management of their service components.

Small Organisations
NMaaS is ideally suited to support the needs of institutional users - either on an NREN managed NMaaS platform or a centralised GÉANT platform.

Distributed Research Projects
By using a managed platform, these projects can focus on their core research and development activities.

NMaaS Benefits

This approach provides key benefits to the users:

	The cloud based platform infrastructure reduces start-up costs and management overhead.
	Each management instance is separated within the platform by design to maintain isolation. This allows institutions and projects to manage separate infrastructure.
	Uses VPN technology to incorporate management platform instance into network instance.