It’s been 15 years since Marc Andreesen remarked that software is eating the world, and it’s fair to wonder if there’s much left to eat. What started with software-as-a-service (SaaS) has come to dominate every business resource. Servers, storage, desktops, database, call centers, security—name an application, and it’s likely running in the cloud, where someone else handles its management and maintenance, and enterprises consume it as a service.
One important pillar of modern technology is missing from that list: the network. Even as enterprises move the IT stack to the cloud, networking has remained stubbornly on-prem. The concept of network-as-a-service (NaaS) has been around for years as a potential alternative to traditional wide-area networks (WAN). But truly viable NaaS models—providing on-demand access to the right network, with the right performance and security, wherever and whenever needed—just never seemed to materialize.
Today, NaaS is a very real option. Organizations across diverse industries—financial services, retail, healthcare, and others—benefit from simply using network services without worrying about building and maintaining that infrastructure. If you’re part of an organization that’s still networking the old-fashioned way and you’ve yet to seriously consider NaaS, it’s time to take a closer look.
The Trouble with Traditional Networks
The concept of running most enterprise applications on-premises seems archaic. What kind of business still uses on-prem payroll software, or customer relationship management (CRM), or office applications? Somehow, we rarely view networks through that lens, even though fundamentally, “networking” is just another application.
It’s not because there’s no room for improvement. On the contrary, large enterprises spend hundreds of millions annually on WAN connectivity and millions more to manage, support, and secure those networks. Beyond the high costs though, legacy models are just a poor fit for contemporary enterprises. Traditional technologies like multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) were designed for simple, static connections between business locations and a centralized data center. But modern enterprise topologies are highly dynamic and distributed, connecting a constantly shifting mix of clouds, SaaS providers, partners, and customer locations. No wonder that seemingly straightforward tasks, like bringing up a new cloud workload, remain so slow, painful, and complicated.
Even recent networking models, like software-defined WAN (SD-WAN), haven’t solved these problems. SD-WAN is less expensive, and its software overlay model promises easier management. But SD-WAN still relies on establishing tunnels that must be configured, maintained, and continually updated whenever something changes. Of greater concern for many enterprises, SD-WAN does not provide the guaranteed connectivity, performance, or security of private MPLS circuits, which mission-critical applications require.
NaaS: A Better Way to WAN
Today, a new generation of NaaS solutions combines flexibility and affordability with privacy, reliability, and performance. These NaaS solutions are delivered under service-level agreements (SLAs) with guaranteed thresholds for loss, latency, and other attributes. They exclusively use private transport networks—not the wide-open internet. At the same time, modern NaaS solutions bring simple provisioning and affordability, with policy and control functions hosted in the cloud. And new NaaS solutions can enable true any-to-any connectivity without the need for pre-built tunnels.
By adopting the NaaS model—without sacrificing performance, reliability, or security—enterprises can realize multiple benefits:
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Lower costs: NaaS eliminates the need for ongoing lifecycle management of network software and infrastructure. Instead, enterprises consume “network” like any other cloud service, on a consumption or committed throughput basis.
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Flexible scalability: No longer do enterprises need to over-provision the network to stay ahead of demand. Instead, they flex network resources up and down as needed, paying for only what they use.
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Continuous upgrades: The NaaS provider performs all ongoing updates and upgrades of the network on an enterprise’s behalf, continually enabling new features and functionality.
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Enhanced security: The NaaS provider takes responsibility for quickly applying ongoing security patches and updates.
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Increased agility: Enterprises can create, tear down, and update sites in a fraction of the time as traditional network technologies.
The Growing NaaS Revolution
Most of these advantages are like those that enterprises enjoy for other cloud services. So why has it taken so long for commercial NaaS solutions to emerge? In fact, several advances have converged over the past several years to make NaaS truly viable.
As the world’s networking infrastructure has evolved, there is now far more private backbone bandwidth available. Like all cloud solutions, NaaS also benefits from significant ongoing price/performance improvements in commercial hardware. Combined with the growing number of carrier-neutral colocation facilities, NaaS providers simply have many more building blocks to assemble reliable, affordable, any-to-any connectivity for practically any location.
The biggest changes derive from the advanced networking and security approaches that today’s NaaS solutions employ. Modern NaaS solutions fully disaggregate control and data planes, hosting control functions in the cloud. As a result, they benefit from practically unlimited (and inexpensive) cloud computing capacity to keep costs low, even as they maintain privacy and guaranteed performance. Even more importantly, the most sophisticated NaaS providers use novel metadata-based routing techniques and maintain end-to-end encryption. These providers have no visibility into enterprise traffic; all encryption/decryption happens only under the business’ direct control.
The biggest change in the networking landscape is just the maturity of NaaS as a solution. There are now major financial services firms, retailers, healthcare organizations, and other enterprises worldwide that use and benefit from NaaS every day, as well as providers with extensive real-world expertise delivering it.
For enterprises that rely on their networks to generate unique value or differentiation, it may be worthwhile to continue building and operating their own WAN. For everyone else, though, it’s worth asking: Does it make sense to treat network care and maintenance as a primary function of your organization? Or would you be better off handing those responsibilities over to an aaS provider, like you do with so many other enterprise applications, and focusing your IT investments on advancing your business?
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