Is NaaS (network-as-a-service) the future?

Enterprises are running more applications in the cloud than ever before. But networking has been lagging behind. Could all this change with the advent of NaaS (network-as-a-service)?

Part of the problem is that many businesses end up paying for a fixed amount of resources rather than scaling up and down to meet demand. 

NaaS is a flexible, cost-effective, single-API solution to this problem – and it looks as though adoption will ramp up in the coming years.

In this article, we take a closer look at NaaS's transformative potential.

So… is it the future?

In 2011, the American businessman Marc Andreessen famously remarked that "software is eating the world". It's astonishing to think that 13 years on, software and cloud-based software solutions are more prevalent than ever.

In the intervening years, a huge array of applications began to be run in the cloud, from servers to storage, from desktops to databases. It's no exaggeration to say that if you can think of an IT service, you can probably run it in the cloud.

Nevertheless, networking has been slow to make the move from a plain old service to networking "as a service". Networks are overwhelmingly internal affairs, with IT responsible for management and maintenance.

With NaaS, however, networking is joining vital other services in the cloud. You get to access complex infrastructure from a single API, no matter where in the world you are.

The idea has been floating around for a while. But it's only now that sectors such as finance, healthcare, government and education are exploring its use cases and benefits.

Why is network-as-a-service a new phenomenon?

In the age of "anything-as-a-service", networks have been noticeably slow to join the party.

Why are they only now available as a service? The answer is that a number of factors needed to overlap to make NaaS possible.

Put simply, the infrastructure is now ready for the job. There's more private backbone bandwidth, more commercial hardware, more colocation facilities and more cloud computing capacity. Moreover, end-to-end encryption is now a given, meaning cloud-based networking is highly secure.

All these factors mean that the days of traditional networking are numbered. Exit the monolith. Enter NaaS.

What can NaaS do that traditional networks can't?

In 2024, most enterprises have all but abandoned on-premise applications. Some institutions use them for processing especially sensitive data. But in general, public cloud solutions – or, at the very least, hybrid cloud solutions – are the norm.

You probably wouldn't run payroll on-site. So, why do so many companies approach networking in this way?

It's not just that legacy architecture is expensive, with connectivity, management, support and security all eating into your budget. It's also that they were designed to meet the network demands of a different time – a time when a network consisted of simple, stable connections between a handful of locations.

Today's networks sprawl. They expand. They change shape. With hybrid working having gone from flavour of the month to standard practice, there are more users and devices than ever to be configured and monitored.