Network-as-a-service (NaaS) is reshaping enterprise networking in our increasingly digital business landscape. With NaaS, companies can purchase a comprehensive suite of network capabilities – including connectivity, cloud access, application performance, security, and network visibility and control – in a flexible subscription-based model without the need to own or maintain complex network infrastructure. Businesses can quickly scale their network resources as needs change, freeing up IT teams to focus on core business initiatives rather than network management.

To realize the full potential of NaaS, two critical elements are necessary: comprehensive ecosystem automation and industry standardization. Automation streamlines NaaS operations, reducing manual intervention and speeding up service delivery. Industry standards ensure consistency and interoperability across different NaaS offerings. Both are essential for enabling NaaS on a global scale, driving efficiency, reliability, and adaptability, and empowering service providers to innovate and expand their offerings to meet the evolving requirements of the enterprise.

Challenges in the current NaaS landscape

While NaaS holds tremendous promise, there are challenges to be addressed. One of the most significant is the lack of industry alignment. Currently, there is no consensus on defining NaaS or its core components and capabilities. This lack of alignment can lead to confusion in the market and slow adoption as enterprises struggle to compare offerings and identify the best fit for their needs.

Another challenge is proprietary API implementations, which silo environments and impede seamless integration and automation. Lack of interoperability makes it difficult for enterprises to integrate services from multiple providers or to switch providers without significant effort and cost, ultimately impacting the ability to implement a comprehensive, end-to-end NaaS solution that spans multiple providers or regions.

Lack of standardization also leads to higher costs across the ecosystem. Custom development and integration efforts for each vendor significantly inflate costs for service providers, which is passed on to enterprises.

The critical role of ecosystem automation and standardization

To maximize NaaS benefits and address challenges, industry stakeholders are taking the lead on multiple fronts. Organizations like MEF are working on standards for NaaS offerings, a crucial step for establishing a common language and set of expectations across the NaaS ecosystem. Standards ensure consistent service delivery and quality across providers and regions, which is key for global enterprises maintaining consistent network performance. Standardization also accelerates innovation, allowing providers to develop and deploy new features quickly while enabling easier integration for enterprises.

Automation throughout the ecosystem enables rapid provisioning and deployment of NaaS services across multiple networks and providers. As NaaS adoption grows, automation becomes essential for managing the increasing complexity and volume of service requests and configurations. Manual processes cannot scale to meet the demands of a globally distributed, on-demand network service ecosystem.

MEF's widely adopted Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) business and operational APIs, and product and service schemas are crucial for enabling NaaS services to flow seamlessly across the automated ecosystem with cloud-like speeds, facilitating interaction between different providers and systems. These standardized APIs and schemas provide a common interoperable language for different systems to communicate, enabling automated provisioning, management, and orchestration of NaaS offerings across multiple providers and technologies.

SASE and certified solutions in the NaaS ecosystem

As the NaaS ecosystem evolves with standardization and automation efforts, security remains a critical consideration. This is where secure access service edge (SASE) and certified solutions play a crucial role in the NaaS landscape.

SASE integrates network security with connectivity. Certified SASE solutions ensure NaaS services meet stringent quality, security, and performance standards and work as expected. This is particularly important in the NaaS ecosystem, where enterprises rely on service providers to deliver consistent, reliable, and secure network services.

The alignment between NaaS standards and certified SASE solutions is essential for creating a robust ecosystem that can meet the complex security and networking needs of modern enterprises.

Enterprises play a key role

Enterprises have a vital role to play in driving the adoption of standardized APIs and promoting greater automation in the NaaS ecosystem. By actively engaging with service providers who are committed to standardized solutions, enterprises can send a clear message about their priorities and influence the direction of NaaS development. This engagement can take many forms, from participating in pilot programs and providing feedback on new standards to explicitly requiring support for industry-standard APIs in their procurement processes.

Global, on-demand NaaS requires the industry to move toward a global federation of service providers. While current business networks are often stitched together through manual processes, the industry is moving toward a standardized automation plane built on the foundation of ecosystem automation and industry standards that will allow service providers worldwide to connect and automate the full lifecycle of business and operational processes. As this vision becomes reality, it will dramatically improve the speed and efficiency of NaaS delivery, offering enterprises the cloud-like experience they demand on a global scale.

The continued collaboration between service providers, enterprises, and standards organizations will be crucial in realizing this transformative potential of NaaS.