Most enterprises now run network as a service (NaaS) and managed network services (MNS) side by side, according to a survey Hanover Research carried out for GTT. In the white paper, 78% of respondents said they already use both. The same research points to four obstacles: visibility, compliance, cost predictability and talent.
Visibility is the biggest barrier to NaaS adoption. Some 75% of enterprises named a lack of observability as an obstacle, and 18% of those said it had stopped adoption more than once. GTT notes that an outage can start in the NaaS layer, in the managed services, or in the handoff between them, and that without unified visibility it is hard to find the source or produce evidence for an audit.
Compliance expectations are high. About 90% require a high or very high standard of audit evidence from network providers, and 94% value provider-maintained immutable logs. On encryption, 91% want to control their own keys, split between full ownership (45%) and a shared model in which the enterprise owns the keys and the provider manages them (46%).
On cost, 61% said five-year total cost of ownership, rather than short-term spend, is the main measure they use to justify NaaS to their boards. That is well ahead of three-year ROI (19%), the EBIT effect of moving capex to opex (11%) and payback period (8%). Around half tolerate budget variances of 6% to 10% and another 39% accept 11% to 15% before finance gets involved. If a NaaS option cut five-year TCO by roughly 30%, 92% would accept quarterly bill swings of up to 15%.
Talent is the fourth pressure. Some 37% named skills shortages as the biggest external influence on their next network update cycle, and 37% prefer AI-driven automated remediation when performance problems arise.
"For most enterprises, the question is no longer whether to combine NaaS and MNS, but how to optimize the combination," said Claudio Scola, vice president of product management at GTT. "You must be able to see, secure and control both environments and operate them as one."
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