Nearly half of IT professionals cited network disruptions as their biggest challenge, while just under half viewed network-as-a-service (NaaS) as a way to offload the burden, according to a recent Cisco report.

The company's 2022 Global Networking Trends report, surveyed more than 1,500 IT professionals across 13 countries and interviewed around 20 IT leaders in a bid to better understand the nascent NaaS market.

More than 45% of respondents said the top benefit of NaaS was to free up IT resources, while 40% expected NaaS to improve disruption response.

“For IT, they are looking at network-as-a-service as a means of taking a burden off of IT,” said Raakhee Mistry, director of product marketing at Cisco. “Our customers are looking for greater resiliency and greater agility, and that's actually a reality of these transitions” to as-a-service.

As enterprises accelerate infrastructure modernization efforts in the wake of the pandemic, Cisco is one of many doubling down on subscription services.

“What our customers are anticipating is, as we move to as-a-service, they're going to be able to take advantage of new innovations and technologies much faster because they don't need to go through the whole lifecycle management,” Mistry added.

While the benefits of NaaS were obvious to respondents, many raised concerns about cost and control. More than a quarter of respondents cited cost and the disruption to existing infrastructure and operations as inhibitors to adoption. 

Mistry also warned that as-a-service is a new financial model and organizations need to think about what that means for their operations. Cisco customers, which choose to purchase equipment, stood to spend nearly three times as much in operational costs, compared to embracing an as-a-service model, she added.

More than a quarter of the respondents believed they'd already deployed NaaS, a finding that took Cisco VP Prashanth Shenoy by surprise.

“We need to provide the guidelines, benchmarks, and industry standards on what constitutes NaaS,” she wrote in a statement. “NaaS needs to have some basic cloud-managed, service-level agreement, flexibility of consumption models, billing, outcome-based, all of these packaged together.”

This is part of the reason NaaS hasn't matured as fast as infrastructure-as-a-service or software-as-a-service, she added. “The rise of NaaS, it is really at its early stages.”

Some of this confusion was rooted in the belief managed services and NaaS were one in the same, Mistry said, explaining that managed services are usually tailored to an individual customer, while as-a-service is available on demand and is designed to scale to the needs of multiple customers.

Cisco defines as-a-service as “a cloud-delivered, usage-based consumption model that we can help orchestrate for our customers, and allow them to do so without having to own, … build, or maintain any of their own infrastructure,” Mistry said.

Mistry anticipates NaaS will become more popular over the next three years. A recent market research report showed that the global NaaS market is expected to increase at compound annual growth rate of 40.7% between 2021 and 2027. 

The prediction is in line with Cisco's own findings, which showed 49% of respondents considered infrastructure refresh or upgrade cycles as a prime opportunity for NaaS adoption.

However, Mistry expressed difficulty predicting the trade-offs that people are willing to make “because a true NaaS model is going to require a more prescriptive approach.”