Network-as-a-service (NaaS) remains a lucrative financial opportunity for network operators in tying together connectivity options for enterprise customers, an opportunity that industry trade group MEF is looking to propel through its API-based “NaaS vision.”

MEF CTO Pascal Menezes explained in an interview with SDxCentral that the group laid out this vision late last year in its NaaS Industry Blueprint. This blueprint relies heavily on operator’s tapping into an API ecosystem designed to help both operators and enterprise customers connect the dots on their respective NaaS journeys.

Menezes noted that the journey begins by taking the basic concept of an enterprise’s networking needs and how an operator can stitch together a product to serve that need. These can then be connected using APIs.

“An enterprise wants connectivity across the world, the provider doesn't have that footprint, but it works with all its ecosystem partners and turns it up with cloud-like speed, which is the absolute goal of on demand,” Menezes said. “And it can change. Whatever throughput changes you need, you can also get through third-party providers.”

That basic connectivity can then be bolstered with Application assurance run through an SD-WAN model. MEF has a lengthy history of work on standardizing SD-WAN, which allows for control over network quality.

Cybersecurity is critical

This work also ties into the need to support enterprise cybersecurity requirements, which is a growing area of focus for enterprises wanting to adopt NaaS. This brings in the need to integrate a secure access service edge (SASE).

“You basically have an enterprise wanting to access its cybersecurity from a remote actor or a remote location and access through a SASE cloud within that provider, but sometimes that remote user is going into geographical areas that provider doesn’t own,” Menezes said.

Some enterprises are able to work around this by putting their data into edge compute platforms distributed at different points of presence (PoPs) or install their own bare metal hardware into those locations.

Menezes said that either way, “our API supports that.”

“The ecosystem in the east-west direction can flourish through our automation, and they can turn up services on underlays, overlays, and cybersecurity,” Menezes added.

These cybersecurity challenges were highlighted by European-based home appliance giant Haier Europe, which recently selected France’s Orange Business to power the connectivity and IoT services for its global digital transformation effort spread across 50 sites.

“During the tendering process we were already, I would say, 70%, 80% clear on where we wanted to get, but we wanted also to understand what was clearly the technical part of it, what they were proposing from the technical side of the equation, what they were also offering from a security component because we wanted to touch both items together; the networking capabilities, but also the security capabilities together,” Simone Pezzoli, group chief digital technology officer for Haier Europe, told SDxCentral of its evaluation process.

The importance of APIs

APIs remain central to these efforts, but Menezes explained that enterprises want a greater level of consistency in dealing with these APIs. This has revolved around three requests.

The first is that these APIs be standards-based, “which is what we’ve done,” Menezes said.

“The second thing is that on these standards they want to operationalize, they want circuit impairments and maintenance updates,” Menezes said. “A lot of times there's impairments or maintenance issues that they don't get notified of and all their people are reacting to it. From an operational standpoint, this is a big problem.”

MEF is “actively working” on a trouble ticketing and incident API to tackle this challenge.

Enterprises also want a better notification system that can alert them in case of a significant incident.

“They want to get alerts when a provider knows of something going on, especially like a flooding attack or some kind of attack, they want to get an alert and they want to be able to subscribe to it,” Menezes explained.

Why is this NaaS opportunity important for operators?

IDC defines enterprise NaaS as “a flexible, operating expense (opex) model of enterprise network infrastructure that includes hardware, software, licenses, and lifecycle services in a single offering.”

Analysys Mason recently reported that traditional network operators like BT, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Verizon, and AT&T are in prime position to capture one-third of the expected $8.7 billion investment enterprises are forecast to make in multicloud network-as-a-service (NaaS) by 2028.

The research predicts those operators will pocket 32% of that global enterprise spend on multicloud NaaS, which “offer platform-based NaaS having introduced sufficient automation and programmability in their IP networks.”

Menezes noted that MEF is working toward helping this multicloud NaaS use case, which can tie together different deployment geographies with an easier management layer.

“We see that there are all kinds of clouds coming in. It's not just hyperscaler clouds, but IoT cloud, SASE cloud, AI clouds, and these service providers should make the cloud experience totally frictionless,” Menezes said. “A customer should be able to say, ‘I want to connect to a cloud in a certain region, certain availability, certain rates,’ and basically it should be able to give a price, a quote, order it, and provision it, and whether it goes to a middle-mile player to do it or directly, it's hidden from the customer, because all they care about is, ‘I want to get this, this cloud, these regions, these places.’”