Verizon Business has launched a new network-as-a-service (NaaS) product focused on helping enterprises manage multiple hyperscaler cloud deployments. The news comes on the heels of reported financial struggles for the operator’s business unit.

The new product is a cloud management service that allows business customers to control application components and network architecture across multiple cloud environments through a unified online portal. This includes public, private and hybrid cloud deployments running on-premises or in hyperscaler ecosystems.

The online portal includes management and insight into overall service health, network traffic, global network cloud connections and issue management tickets. It also allows for users to establish connectivity between public, private and hybrid cloud environments, and between cloud and network infrastructure at the edge. The single management layer also supports oversight of uniform security, governance and configuration processes.

Verizon Business’s Debika Bhattacharya explained in an interview that the new offering targets a growing multicloud headache for enterprise customers. Bhattacharya was recently named chief technology solutions officer for Verizon Business, having previously served as chief product officer of the operating unit.

“Our large enterprise customers, they have multiple cloud providers. There’s AWS (Amazon Web Services), there’s Azure, there’s Google's GCP, Oracle, IBM, all the large cloud providers; and what has happened is the environment has become very complex as they build applications on these different clouds,” Bhattacharya said. “Just the combinations of endpoints-to-cloud, cloud-to-cloud, data center-to-cloud, have made the whole networking environment extremely complex. You don't have visibility across all these clouds. They don't have tools that can manage all the different clouds.”

Verizon is tackling this challenge and differentiating itself in the market by tapping its network-level expertise.

“Where we extend, which our competitors do not, is we extend into the networking areas of the cloud itself,” Bhattacharya added. “The load balancers, the firewalls, all of that inside the cloud infrastructure, we're now going to allow our customers to have visibility and manage that part of the network as well. There's the actual physical infrastructure that is Verizon assets, but we're extending our management into the networking elements within the cloud providers as well.”

Bhattacharya further explained that the Verizon Business platform acts as an extension of a managed services provider (MSP) service that can extend into these different cloud environments.

“But more importantly, what it does is it gives our customers visibility to manage their connections to cloud, which is a layer above the SD-WAN networking layer,” Bhattacharya said. “Now they have toolsets and visibility to know how much traffic are they using within AWS, how much data are they transferring to Azure, do they have problems with that Azure connection. The SD-WAN connection is the lower tier below the network framework. With this they can manage their connections to each of the cloud providers in a much simpler way than they would have to do today.”

Bhattacharya noted the overall service might compete most directly with services from vendors like Equinix or Megaport. “They provide connectivity to the cloud, but they don’t provision the elements that are inside network elements that are inside the router,” she explained.

Bhattacharya added that since it’s part of Verizon Business’s NaaS framework, a customer can select to use just the Cloud Management platform, but said “the benefit is really to use our NaaS framework where the network is the platform that allows them to connect on their site, their devices, but also have more simple and flexible connectivity to multiple cloud providers.”

NaaS is often defined as a way for customers to gain the operational benefits of connectivity without having to deal with the deployment or management of that connectivity method. This basically removes the need for an enterprise or organization to have networking expertise and it can instead focus on business results.

This model also allows for greater financial flexibility as an organization can trade the capex that would have been required to install a network with an opex model of paying only for what they need.

ABI Research predicts that more than nine in 10 enterprises will select this usage-based consumption model for at least a quarter of their network services by 2030.

The new Verizon NaaS service launch comes just weeks after Verizon Business posted disappointing full-year results. The division reported a 3.6% drop in revenues for 2023 compared with 2022, with operating income falling a more substantial 24% year over year.

Verizon Business includes the carrier’s wireless and wireline services targeted at enterprise and public-sector customers. Those services include its ThingSpace IoT, 5G multi-access edge computing (MEC), private 5G, security, MSP and Virtual Network Services (VNS).

Verizon’s management explained that legacy wireline operations were having the biggest impact on its current business financials, which was offsetting more robust growth in business wireless and fixed-wireless access (FWA) growth.

Verizon last month also slashed the valuation of its business unit due to a downturn in the division highlighting Verizon’s ongoing challenges in converting that business toward new technology opportunities.