Over the past decade and a half, the technology industry has been reshaped by "as a service"models applied to various aspects of IT. First was software, which created the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, then infrastructure as a service (IaaS) arose and has become a dominant enterprise platform. Recently, the long-awaited evolution of applying asa-service models to the network has emerged, ushering in the next frontier of IT and network transformation.
The evolution of network-as-a-service (NaaS)models has been driven by the operational complexity of modern networking and a desire for organizations to optimize their networking staff to focus on businessenabling tasks when managing their campus and branch local and wide area networks(WANs). IDC survey data reinforces these priorities. IDC's June 2023 Future of Connectedness Survey asked more than 700 global respondents what the most important business outcomes were from new and ongoing connectivity initiatives in the past year. The top-rated response was to improve customer satisfaction, but the second and third responses touch specifically on the pain points and benefits of NaaS: a desire to increase operational efficiency and improve employee productivity.