The era of cloud consumption and digital transformation has greatly increased the demands placed on networks for organizations of every size. At one time, it was common for all critical business applications to live on-premises, and that made connectivity and security much less complex in most cases.

Today, connectivity and security are anything but simple, with hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud, SaaS, distributed workers, and IoT forcing companies to think about networking in new ways. The internet is critical infrastructure, physical connectivity is increasing in complexity, and security is at the forefront. Most IT departments need more resources to deal with the protocols, peering, and complex network topologies (often across infrastructure they don’t control) required to meet these challenges.

In response, we’ve seen a multitude of network-as-a-service (NaaS) products and platforms spring up to fill the need. NaaS comes in multiple flavors, but they all aim to deliver value by making networking easy again—often easier than it was in the pre-cloud world, and certainly faster to deploy new services. NaaS, like most other XaaS (cloud) offerings, accomplishes this by outsourcing the architecture, engineering, and operation of the physical infrastructure to a provider or partner, which frees up your IT team to focus on your business’ true differentiators while it also provides more visibility and control than you probably would have otherwise