Just as the cloud has enabled a highly customisable, subscription-based approach to almost everything consumers and businesses seek to consume, organisations are viewing the network as the next logical step for a consumption-based approach. The recently released Deloitte 2022 Technology Industry Outlook looks at how leaders across all industries are embracing service-based IT - delivered via cloud - for increased agility, new capabilities, and better management of capacity and costs.

The end-goal for a CIO adopting a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) approach is to create a predictable, cloud-like consumption model for enterprise infrastructure. NaaS is designed to ensure that the enterprise network is state of the art and continually adopts innovations, frees the enterprise IT staff from monitoring tasks, rolls up the range of SLAs, and reduces the need for specialist skills in-house.

The Internet of Things (IoT) market is evolving at a rapid pace and while some of the early predictions for tens of billions of connected devices by 2022 have proved to be wide of the mark, the use cases are so varied that explosive adoption is likely. However, the encroachment of IoT into all aspects of our personal and business lives brings with it plenty of concerns, from security and data ownership, to business models that acknowledge and enable the global nature of connected devices.