Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) is a cloud-based model where organizations rent networking capabilities from a provider instead of building and maintaining their infrastructure. It enables businesses to manage their networks entirely through software, requiring only an internet connection.
NaaS can replace traditional solutions like virtual private networks (VPNs), multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), and on-premises hardware such as firewalls and load balancers. As a modern approach to routing traffic and enforcing security policies, NaaS is reshaping enterprise network architecture.
How did NaaS develop?
When most enterprises were configuring their network infrastructure, the Internet itself was not considered a trusted place to conduct business. So they built their internal private versions of the Internet and connected facilities to one another with rented links. They needed to configure their wide area networks (WANs), and each office location needed its hardware for firewalls, DDoS protection, load balancing, and so on. Enterprises also needed to set up dedicated connections between each location using a method such as MPLS.
When employees connected to the Internet instead of the internal network, their traffic had to first go through the corporate networking infrastructure via a VPN before it could go out to the Internet. For instance, if a company’s headquarters were in Austin, Texas and a company employee in a branch office in New Orleans, Louisiana needed to load a website, their HTTP request for the website would travel through the corporate VPN, across an MPLS link to the headquarters in Austin (about 800 kilometers away), and then out to the wider Internet.
This model quickly became inefficient as some business activities began moving into the cloud. For instance, imagine the New Orleans employee frequently used a SaaS application, meaning they needed to load content over the Internet constantly. Their requests, and the requests of other employees, would become bottlenecked in the Austin data center, slowing down network service.
In addition, more capabilities have become available through the cloud as cloud computing becomes more efficient. Today, DDoS mitigation, firewalls, load balancing, and other important networking functions can all run in the cloud, eliminating the need for internal IT teams to build and maintain these services.
For these reasons, NaaS is a more efficient option than relying on internally maintained WANs that require constant maintenance and often create bottlenecks for network traffic. With NaaS, company employees can connect to their cloud services directly through a virtual network that an external vendor manages and secures, instead of internal IT teams attempting to keep up with the demand for network services.
If our example company switches to a NaaS model, the New Orleans-based employee no longer has to wait for their web traffic to travel through all the internal corporate infrastructure. Instead, they simply connect to the Internet and sign in through a browser, and they can access all the cloud services they need. Meanwhile, the NaaS provider secures their browsing activity, protects their data, and routes their web traffic wherever it needs to go, as efficiently as possible.
In many ways, NaaS is the logical result of several decades of business processes migrating to the cloud. Today, the whole network can be offered as a service, instead of just software, infrastructure, or platforms.
What are the challenges of NaaS?
Compatibility: The NaaS vendor’s infrastructure may not be compatible with legacy systems that are still in place — older hardware, on-premise-based applications, etc.
