Managed LAN vs Connectivity-as-a-Service: what's the difference?

The basics

First of all, it’s important to understand the key guiding principles of Managed LAN and Connectivity-as-a-Service:

Managed LAN

• Management of the local area network is outsourced to an expert IT provider
• Their expertise can help ensure problems are detected and solved quickly, maximising the uptime of the network
• Most Managed LAN offerings will also incorporate security and upgrades
• Some will also feature zero-touch provisioning and scalable architecture

Connectivity-as-a-Service

• Every element of a business’s connectivity is delivered by a single IT provider on a subscription, pay-per-user basis
• This includes LAN, WAN, Voice, security, management and maintenance
• CaaS is managed through the cloud, removing the need for customers to buy and own hardware, firmware and software
• The ability to sell equipment to the provider and lease it back means no capital expenditure is required at all
  
  

The differences

Ownership: With Managed LAN, the customer buys the LAN equipment upfront and owns it, with the provider only delivering its expertise in management, maintenance and updates.

With CaaS, on the other hand, the customer isn’t required to own anything, and everything needed is either provided as part of the subscription, or is bought and leased back if already owned. In short: Managed LAN is ‘buy and own’, while CaaS is ‘rent and operate’.

Scope: Managed LAN is one very specific requirement of a host of different technological needs a business might have. Because of this, it tends to work in correspondence with other service providers that provide other functionality.

With CaaS, everything is rolled into one contract, one provider and one point of contact. Every function coordinates with every other, and everything is managed within a single ecosystem that the provider owns. All this is delivered alongside relevant skill sets, third-party suppliers and other key components.

Flexibility: Managed LAN tends to come as a fixed package of services and solutions, some of which might be needed and some of which may be unnecessary or unwanted. However, 56% of organisations say they would remove an IT infrastructure or services provider if they did not have flexible IT consumption options.

With that in mind, Connectivity-as-a-Service provides complete flexibility to put together a package that can be scaled up or down as user demands change, paid by a fluctuating and transparent monthly bill that delivers full predictability of costs.

Key takeaways

It’s clear that flexibility is now the key to the IT consumption offerings that businesses want. Increasingly, they are focusing on overall outcomes and how solutions help their organisations, rather than the actual capabilities of each individual component.

It’s for this reason that Connectivity-as-a-Service stands out as the ideal option in the modern business world. It takes all the offerings of a Managed LAN contract and expands them with a radical approach to ownership, a much larger scope, greater choice to the customer and with full financial predictability and transparency.

Just like your mobile phone contract or your car lease, it’s the access that’s more important than the ownership.

Learn more about Tiviti's Connectivity-as-a-Service, and the scale of the solution, from LAN management and Voice to security and maintenance, here.