NaaS hasn’t lived up to the hype. Is it still worth it?
Network World ·
In 2021, Gartner expected a promising future for Network as a Service (NaaS). At the time, adoption accounted for less than 1% of enterprises, and Gartner expected that number to rise to 15% by 2024. Instead, in Gartner’s latest hype cycle for networking , NaaS is still at 1% to 5% market penetration. That’s short of Gartner’s earlier expectations. In fact, Gartner places NaaS deep in the “trough of disillusionment” in its 2026 Hype Cycle for Enterprise Networking. Making the case for NaaS NaaS has been working out for the Rivers School, which has a 55-acre campus in eastern Massachusetts that’s home to a preparatory school and a music conservatory, totaling more than 1,700 students combined. John Adams, Rivers’ director of technology and innovation, came on board in the summer of 2024, and upgrading the school’s aging LAN was his top priority. At the time, the school had a network with 115 Wi-Fi access points, plus switches, routers, cables, and two ISPs providing connectivity. “Our entire switch inventory needed to be replaced, and about one-third of the access points were end-of-life as well,” Adams says. “I made a pitch to our senior leadership that we needed to make an update,” he says. After the board approved the request and allocated a budget, Adams went out to research options. The initial plan was to upgrade the equipment the school already had starting with the most out-of-date hardware first, improve coverage and performance, improve the security, and to try to do it all without adding headcount. There was one employee managing the network, with nobody else on the five-person technology team qualified to help, so, ideally, the new system would also allow someone to step in and take on some of the work if necessary. Instead of a piecemeal update to the existing setup, Rivers opted for NaaS, picking one of the two major vendors in the space, Meter . The final decision was made in late spring of 2025, and the new network was up and running by the time classes resumed at the end of August. Over the course of the summer, Meter performed a site survey, designed the network, ran cables through buildings with cinderblocks and horsehair plaster, and installed and tested all the equipment. The new network covers 250,000 square feet of building space, has 195 access points, 55 switches, three firewalls, and the cables connecting everything together. All the equipment is manufactured and owned by Meter, installed by Meter, and maintained or replaced by Meter as needed. The number of devices as well as network coverage, performance, security, and manageability, all improved dramatically. And the fact that all the hardware is Meter’s made it a more attractive option than using a managed services provider, Adams says. “With the MSPs, we’d be using different companies,” he says. “Palo Alto firewalls, Aruba switches … There’s no ownership of the hardware by the MSP.” The one limitation of the NaaS approach is geography. A couple of the new access points are located in pavilions, so there’s some coverage of outdoor spaces, but, for the most part, the school’s sports fields and other exterior spaces aren’t covered. “Meter bills by square footage, so if you add huge soccer fields, it can add up,” Adams says. The biggest immediate benefit was the ease of management—plus not having to worry about paying overtime for service calls. “The quality of the dashboard is such that there’s not too much training needed for it,” Adams says. “It’s night and day having visibility in the network. It just made the quality of our work better. We can do things, and it’s very easy.” Instead of users complaining about network problems, the issues come up on the dashboard or as notifications, and the team can start resolving them before any complaints even come in. If something goes wrong that can be handled virtually, Adams and his team either do it themselves or someone at Rivers takes care of it, even after hours. And, if there’s a physical issue, “They’ll send someone on-site.” The support piece was something that Adams had originally underestimated significantly, he says, when looking at making upgrades to the existing infrastructure the traditional way. If there was an issue that required people to come in for 20 hours outside of normal working hours, that would have been something he’d have to go to the CFO for. “And if I want to add access points, that’s another conversation with the CFO.” With the NaaS model, everything is included, he says. “In the long run, I would say we’re saving money.” The challenges holding NaaS back But not every organization would see the same benefits as Rivers did. For example, if a company already has a working network, then ripping everything out and switching to a NaaS approach might be a waste of time and money. According to Gartner, consumption-based pricing models can be unpredictable—and, in general, NaaS can be more expensive than traditional capex-based pricing models. Plus, with NaaS supplying the hardware, organizations get locked into the platform. NaaS makes sense when organizations have limited resources and are looking for a turnkey, SLA-based network solution with no asset ownership, Gartner says. Siân Morgan, research director at Dell’Oro Group, has been looking at the LAN-as-a-service market for the past three years and examining the expectation that it would take the cloud computing model and translate it to networking. But she’s seeing vendors struggling in actually doing this. “There’s a lot of local hardware required for campus networking, which makes it difficult to simulate a cloud-inspired model,” she says. In addition, the legacy approach gives enterprises a lot of flexibility in how they build and use their local area networks. “The technology that the LAN-as-utility vendors have designed has taken away a lot of the flexibility,” she says. NaaS is further evolved on the WAN side of the equation, says fellow Dell’Oro analyst Mauricio Sanchez, senior director of enterprise security and networking research. Traditional telecom providers offer a form of NaaS, he says. “And what is now happening is that some of the SASE providers have transformed themselves into quasi-NaaS providers,” he says. “You can decommission your WAN backbone link and give them all the traffic … that’s a fork in the road that increasingly more enterprises are taking.” But these services don’t typically offer the full breadth of features that a traditional WAN would have. “People are going to be upset if the expectations are larger than the reality,” he says. And, both on the WAN and LAN sides of NaaS, there’s the metered billing approach that can cause sticker shock if usage increases unexpectedly. “We’ve heard horror stories time and again of the cloud bills coming in and—oh, boy—it’s getting quite pricey,” says Sanchez. “We’re still going through the thrashing out of how the pricing should work, and there are going to be pitfalls for the enterprise if they’re on the wrong side of the equation and get burned.” What even is NaaS, anyway? One of the reasons that NaaS is seeing limited adoption is that most services branded as NaaS are just pricing or licensing changes—or are network-on-demand offerings from carriers. “The NaaS term is often misused to the point of it becoming nondescriptive,” Gartner says. Dell’Oro’s Morgan agrees that there’s a lack of clarity around what NaaS actually is, as do other analysts. “It is a huge definition problem,” says David Lessin, research director at ISG, a research and tech advisory firm. “If you’re a cloud engineer, you have one definition. Some of the carriers make the problem worse because they also offer network-as-a-service, but it’s a completely different type of network as a service. They’re all coming from different vantage points and perspectives.” For mobile network operators, there’s pressure to monetize 5G rollouts, says Peter Boyland, an analyst at Juniper Research. “Vendors are increasingly looking to enterprise use cases as the consumer sector disappoints,” he says. “This may have led to over-promising on the potential of NaaS.” In general, NaaS seems to be used most often to refer to the infrastructure layers of the network as opposed to the management software, security tools, and services and support—though many NaaS vendors do include these in their offerings. In addition, some NaaS vendors are also offering WAN as a service via partnerships. Meter, for example, offers LAN hardware such as switches, firewalls, wireless access points, and power distribution units, security tools, as well as services such as network design, configuration and installation, and management. It connects to outside providers for Internet and cellular connectivity and with Lumen for integrated WAN connectivity. Chief competitor Nile also offers LAN hardware, design, deployment, and management services, and integrates with Internet providers, WAN providers, and external SSE vendors. But NaaS offers more features and capabilities, ISG’s Lessin says, versus, say, a specific, narrow product like SASE. “It’s King Kong versus a mouse shrew,” he says. “They can do so much more—infinite capabilities.” According to an ISG survey of 200 senior network decision-makers released in June, 64% see NaaS as a fundamental architectural shift toward cloud-native, service-based networking, not just a pricing model or SD-WAN rebrand. And among organizations running or piloting Naas, 44% prefer a phased transition from MPLS or legacy WAN. The ISG survey shows that only 1% of organizations have a fully mature NaaS deployment. However, 61% say that they have “at least partially adopted NaaS” across selected users, sites, applications, or broader network operations. NaaS may not have lived up to the hype, but whether it’s a disappointment depends on what enterprises expect it to deliver.