Network as a Service: Why Your Customers Are About to Stop Buying Networks (And Start Subscribing to Them) 

Let me start with a confession. In our business, we’re really good at two things: building networks and inventing acronyms to describe them. So when something like Network as a Service (NaaS) starts generating buzz, it’s tempting to roll your eyes and assume it’s just managed services wearing a fresh marketing hat. 

I get it. I really do. But this one is different—and I’d argue it’s one of the most important shifts technology advisors will navigate over the next five years. Because NaaS isn’t really about technology at all. It represents a fundamental change in how customers want to buy, consume, and operate network infrastructure.  

Here’s the kicker: our data tells us that 84% of Telarus technology advisors transact on networks. So whether you call yourself a networking specialist or not, this conversation is coming for your book of business. 

Let’s break it down. 

What Network as a Service Actually Is (and What It Isn’t) 

NaaS is the delivery of network infrastructure as a subscription—connectivity, security, management, and lifecycle operations consumed on demand, without the customer necessarily owning the underlying hardware. 

An ISG survey from April 2026 revealed that 60% of large enterprises had either broadly or partially adopted NaaS, while 31% were conducting pilots or evaluations. Some of the leading reasons for NaaS adoption included cloud migration, increasing use of SaaS, and internal mandates for digital transformation. 

A few important clarifications before we go any further, because the industry is doing its level best to make this term as confusing as possible: 

• NaaS isn’t just managed services. Managed services traditionally meant, “I bought the hardware, now someone else manages it.” NaaS is built around cloud-native delivery, automation, elastic scaling, API provisioning, and ongoing lifecycle abstraction. Different animal. 

• NaaS isn’t just SD-WAN. SD-WAN is one of the enabling technologies. NaaS is the operating model wrapped around it. 

• NaaS isn’t one thing. You’ll see WAN as a Service (WANaaS), LAN (or campus) as a Service (LANaaS), connectivity fabrics, and managed NaaS overlays—and many suppliers play in multiple categories. That blurring of the lines is intentional, and frankly, it’s pretty smart. Why? Because customers increasingly care less about which box they bought and more about whether the outcome got delivered. 

Why Now? The Stars Finally Aligned 

NaaS isn’t a new idea. The reason it’s suddenly everywhere is that the infrastructure to deliver it at scale finally caught up to the ambition. 

How we got here: 

• A decade ago, networks were heavily dependent on fixed hardware, manual provisioning, static routing, and appliance-centric architectures.  

• Today, networks are software-defined and programmable. SD-WAN pulled routing intelligence away from the physical box.  

• Cloud-native infrastructure, virtualized network functions, and APIs made provisioning dramatically faster.  

• AI and automation are starting to create networks that monitor and heal themselves. 

At the same time, customer pressure exploded. Organizations are wrestling with AI-driven traffic growth, distributed users, cloud sprawl, IoT expansion, and a staffing crisis inside IT that doesn’t look like it’s letting up anytime soon. The old model of “buy hardware every five years and hope nothing changes” started cracking under the weight of reality. 

The same forces that transformed how customers buy compute and software have officially arrived at the network layer. We’ve seen this movie before—we just have a new lead actor. 

The Real Story: Buying Behavior Is Changing 

Here’s where it gets interesting, and where I want every advisor reading this to pay close attention. The technology evolution is the easy part. The bigger story is the disruption to how customers buy. 

The old motion looked like this: Select hardware. Issue an RFP (or not). Vendors compete on specs and price. Big CapEx request. Hardware shows up weeks or months later.

Internal IT deploys it and owns the lifecycle for the next five to seven years. That model worked for a long time. The CDWs and SHIs of the world have built thriving businesses on it. 

The new motion looks nothing like that. The network is just too important.   

• The CFO is in the room earlier. 

• Line-of-business leaders are influencing decisions.
  
• Operations teams care more about agility than specifications. 

• Security is woven into every conversation, and the tension between “evolve fast to meet the business” and “keep everything locked down” is creating real friction inside customer organizations. 

• Customers are now asking different questions: Why are we still buying networks like they’re depreciating industrial equipment?  

• The conversation is shifting from ownership to outcomes, from hardware refresh cycles to operational flexibility, from specifications to SLAs and experience. 

Remember that customers aren’t doing this just to save money (though they’ll always take that). They’re trying to avoid operational rigidity, staffing burden, lifecycle complexity, and long-term inflexibility.  

That’s the philosophy shift. Don’t miss it. 

When NaaS Isn’t the Right Answer 

Now, before anyone goes pitching NaaS to every customer with a router, let me pump the brakes. Not every organization should move to a NaaS model, and knowing when not to position it will make you a more credible advisor. 

Traditional ownership still makes sense for: 

• Cash-rich organizations with the flexibility to absorb hardware costs 

• Highly static environments where things just don’t change much 

• Customers with large, mature, deeply credentialed engineering teams 

• Heavily regulated environments with rigid, unique operational requirements (think certain government use cases) 

A quick caveat on that third bullet—because my engineering team rightly pushed back on it. Even customers with mature network teams want to offload the low-hanging fruit: proactive monitoring, AIOps, self-healing. They may not call it “NaaS,” but they’re asking for the components of it. Listen for that. 

NaaS fits best where customers are distributed, cloud-heavy, resource-constrained, and scaling quickly. Or where the operations team is drowning trying to keep up with what the business is throwing at them. 

This is not “old networking is dead.” This is “customer priorities are diversifying.” Big difference. 

Signals to Listen For 

Want to know when a NaaS conversation is sitting right in front of you?  

Listen for these: 

• An upcoming hardware refresh: The best NaaS conversations often start with, “Why are we refreshing this infrastructure right now? What’s actually changing in the business?” 

• Hiring struggles: If they can’t fill the network engineering roles, they don’t have the labor to run a traditional model. 

• Slow provisioning complaints: “It takes us six weeks to turn up a site” is a flashing neon sign. 

• Lifecycle fatigue: Customers tired of the rip-and-replace cycle every five years are ready for a different model. 

• AI workload planning: AI increases data movement, edge dependency, and observability requirements in ways many traditional models can’t keep up with. 

These aren’t sales questions—they’re discovery questions. The kind that uncover real operational pain and open the door to outcomes the customer actually cares about: agility, continuity, simplicity, and the ability to scale without hiring an army. 

How to Find the Right NaaS Supplier (Without Guessing) 

This is where I see advisors get stuck. Once you’ve identified the opportunity, how do you know which suppliers genuinely deliver NaaS versus which ones are just slapping the label on a legacy offer? (The infamous “we do that!” problem.) 

Here’s the shortcut: use Supplier Matrix Pro inside the Telarus Hub. 

Go to Suppliers → Supplier Matrix Pro → Advanced Networking → and filter on the NaaS service type checkbox.  

What you’ll get is an engineering-vetted, differentiated view of the suppliers who actually deliver NaaS the way it’s supposed to be delivered—not just the ones with a clever landing page.  

We have over a dozen suppliers in the portfolio with a true NaaS offering, spanning WANaaS (Lumen, Zayo), connectivity fabrics (Megaport, Equinix, 11:11 Systems), backbone overlays (Alkira, Graphiant), and LAN/campus as a Service (Meter). 

Combine that intel with the Telarus Sales Engineering team and you have a pretty unfair advantage. We’ve connected the dots, sat through the vendor pitches, and we’ll happily translate the marketing into plain English for you and your customer. 

The Bottom Line for Technology Advisors: The Network is Changing 

Here’s what I want you to take away from all of this: the network is becoming less of a product customers own and more of a platform they consume. 

That sentence has serious implications for how you build pipeline, how you talk to customers, and where you spend your discovery time. The advisor who shows up with a parts list is going to lose to the advisor who shows up with outcome-based questions. Every single time. 

And there’s a real first-mover advantage in this category. Once a NaaS supplier is embedded across a customer’s branches or backbone, that infrastructure tends to stay put. 

Whoever helps the customer make that decision is the advisor with a seat at the table for years to come. That’s not hyperbole—that’s how this market is going to play out. 

Your Next Step: Get Telarus Involved  

If this resonates—if you’re sitting on a network conversation right now and you’re not sure how to evolve it from a circuit quote into a strategic NaaS discussion—don’t go it alone.  

Here’s what I’d recommend: 

1. Open the Telarus Hub and run Supplier Matrix Pro on your next networking opportunity. Filter for NaaS and see who fits.
2. Engage Telarus Sales Engineering before your next discovery call. Our team places NaaS deals every day, and we’ll help you ask the right questions—and avoid the wrong ones.
3. Add the Telarus blog and Next Level BizTech podcast to your toolkit so you stay ahead of the next shift before it lands in your customer’s RFP. 

NaaS is not a marketing term you can afford to ignore. It’s the new operating model for the network layer, and the customers who are buying it want advisors who understand both the technology and the business reasons driving the change. 

The good news? You don’t have to figure it out alone. You’ve got a team behind you that’s been through every phase of this evolution, watched the acronyms come and go, and built the tools to help you win the deals that matter. 

So the next time a customer says, “We’re thinking about refreshing the network”—smile, lean in, and ask the better question. 

That’s where the wins start.