NaaS is a subscription model wherein a vendor supplies, manages and maintains the school’s network infrastructure, and also handles any refresh responsibilities. It automates almost all aspects of day-to-day networking operations while improving wireless performance and cybersecurity, according to Steinke.
“There’s a whole lot of issues with managing a large network, and this simplifies all of that, not just because I don’t have to maintain it, but I don’t even have to think about it much of the time,” he said.
SERVICE ISSUES
Over the years, Steinke said the school’s network, spread across a 25-acre campus in Silicon Valley, had become increasingly complex, which made it harder to maintain and secure. He added that the IT team was spending a lot of time on network service issues, which meant less time for innovation and interaction with students.
“We’ve run our own network for about 30 years,” Steinke said. “Things were working pretty good, but we would have some areas where there would be interference, for example, and it was very hard to troubleshoot.”
Such interference often occurred when adjacent classrooms in separate buildings with network differences would pick up each other’s wireless signals, causing connectivity problems for teachers and students, he said.
When an acquaintance mentioned NaaS from a nearby company called Nile, Steinke said he was cautiously open to the idea. To evaluate the service, he set up a “proof of concept” site in the IT office to test Nile’s compatibility with a full range of campus devices, from HVAC systems and surveillance cameras to laptops and printers.
“We discovered along the way that there were a few things that needed to be improved, and Nile responded to that appropriately,” Steinke said. “When they demonstrated to us that they could actually meet every single need for us, at that point we went for it.”
MORE PEACE OF MIND
Over two days during spring break 2023, Steinke said the Nile team came in and replaced every piece of wired and wireless networking equipment in one of the most complicated buildings on campus.
“That was like a microcosm of our entire campus. It had offices, it had classrooms, it had open spaces like the library where lots of students would go and then leave, and there would be a lot of dynamic changes to just what the needs were for the network,” Steinke said. “And so when that worked, we decided to fast track the rest of the campus.”
But first, Saint Francis had to make some upgrades of its own, such as replacing 30-year-old fiber cables running beneath buildings. Between that and working around school functions, Steinke said, the full transition took until January 2025 to complete.
“We wanted to coordinate it very carefully and also perform other internal upgrades to our network to make sure that Nile wasn’t just replacing an old network with an old infrastructure of cabling with a new network on an old infrastructure of cabling,” he said.
Now that the transition is complete, Steinke said the school has not had any connectivity complaints, and he has more peace of mind because Nile's AI-powered access service includes zero-trust protocols for every device that attempts to connect to the campus network.
“When there are problems or other issues that come up, their system detects that and responds automatically before a human being is engaged, so it responds more quickly,” Steinke said. “But to me, [for] the end user, the effect is just that things work better. That’s what matters to me — somebody’s watching over all the devices, whether it’s automatic or a human being.”
ADDED BENEFITS
One added benefit of the subscription service, according to Steinke, is that it allowed Saint Francis to sidestep the challenge of finding and hiring someone with the expertise to run the “inner workings of networks” and also manage all the other tasks that come with school IT.
“Finding someone who understands all the nuances of the different pieces of our network, it’s tough to find that, and then hiring them and paying a competitive salary is difficult,” he said. “And so in this way, we were able to outsource that problem of staffing as well. It’s embedded into the service.”
Perhaps the biggest added benefit to NaaS is that the IT team, no longer devoted to network maintenance, has more time to invest in other services. Steinke said the team is now mentoring students on technology usage, software development and systems management.
“Really, it’s much more fun to be out there working with people,” he said.
