What Is Network as a Service (NaaS)?

Businesses benefit when they align their costs with actual usage. They don't need to pay for surplus capacity that goes unused, and they can dynamically add capacity as demands increase. Businesses that own their own infrastructure must implement upgrades, bug fixes, and security patches in a timely manner. Often, IT staff may have to travel to various locations to implement changes. NaaS enables the continuous delivery of new fixes, features and capabilities. It automates multiple processes such as onboarding new users and provides orchestration and optimization for maximum performance. This can help to eliminate the time and money spent on these processes. Enterprises rely on vendors to provide full-lifecycle management.

Today's workers may require access to the network from anywhere—home or office—on any devices and without relying on VPNs. NaaS can provide enterprises with global coverage, low-latency connectivity enabled by a worldwide POP backbone, and negligible packet loss when connecting to SaaS applications, platform-as-a-service (PaaS)/infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms, or branch offices.

NaaS results in tighter integration between the network and the network security. Some vendors may "piece together" network security. By contrast, NaaS solutions need to provide on-premise and cloud-based security to meet today’s business needs, thereby accelerating transition to a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture where and when it's needed.

NaaS provides proactive network monitoring, security policy enforcement, advanced firewall and packet inspection capabilities, and modeling of the performance of applications and the underlying infrastructure over time. Customers may also have an option to co-manage the NaaS.

In a multicloud world, it's critical to have connectivity that supports the same user experience as if the application was hosted in-house.  NaaS provides AI-driven capabilities to help ensure SLAs and SLOs for capacity are met or exceeded. NaaS provides the ability to route application traffic to help ensure outstanding user experience and to proactively address issues that occur.

NaaS services are delivered through a cloud model to offer greater flexibility and customization than conventional infrastructure. Changes are implemented through software, not hardware. This is typically provided through a self-service model. IT teams can, for example, reconfigure their corporate networks on demand and add new branch locations in a fraction of the time. NaaS often provides term-based subscription with usage billing and multiple payment options to support various consumption requirements.

NaaS is inherently more scalable than traditional, hardware-based networks. NaaS customers simply purchase more capacity instead of purchasing, deploying, configuring, and securing additional hardware. This means they can scale up or down quickly as needs change.