A Problem 40 Years in the Making

In 1983, Bob Metcalf, the inventor of Ethernet, postulated that the value of a network grows as the square of the number of its users. In other words, double the number of connections on your network is worth four times as much. Decades later, he published a paper showing that "Metcalf's Law" was fully proven by Facebook's meteoric rise.

It may not have the cachet of Moore's better-known law, but honestly, it is more applicable to what's happening in modern enterprises.

If Metcalf's law seems overly theoretical, don't worry. You can see the shadow of Metcalf's law everywhere in today's business world. Driven to harness this network effect, enterprises are sprinting to expand their networks by connecting to:

To accomplish that, the business first extends its network to include all business partners.

Legacy Extranets Fail

The problem is that legacy methods of setting up business extranets struggle to meet the demands of today's fast-paced, digitally-driven business environment due to their inability to adapt to technological advancements, security issues, high maintenance costs, inefficiencies, obstacles to digital transformation, and limitations in data sharing. Specifically, legacy networks:

How can a modern enterprise embrace extranets in a way that addresses these challenges?

Extranet-as-a-Service – The Modern Way to Accomplish B2B Networking

Gartner introduced the concept of the Extranet-as-a-Service in their 2023 Hype Cycle for Enterprise Networking. Gartner predicts that Extranets-as-a-Service will simplify the setting-up and operation of extranets.

In the era of the data economy, every vendor offering a product that generates data will likely convert that product into a service to provide a better Service Level Agreement (SLA) to their customers. Consequently, every business entity will require access to their data. This situation presents interesting challenges from both security and compliance perspectives. Opening up security access to your business partners will necessitate much stricter scrutiny and adherence to compliance standards.

Data exchanges will be established at multiple points, with two ideal locations for creating these business partner data exchanges, often referred to as extranets-as-a-service:

Business partners will prefer to exchange data at the most financially and regulatorily sensible location for them.

How does an Extranet-as-a-Service work? First, eliminate all that complex extranet gear you've been manually provisioning, configuring, and managing for decades. You know—things like firewalls, VPNs, SSL certificates, etc.

Instead, use a modern, high-speed, secure Network-as-a-Service to connect partners, customers, and other networks. Just place a single, simple "network edge" within the network you want to connect to the NaaS (it can be software or a connection to one of our gateways).

You then define all networking policies based on business relationships (who can talk to whom and what each user is permitted to do) through a simple, visual interface on a cloud portal. And just like that – you've networked with your partners, customers, etc. Simple and fast.

Extranet-as-a-Service Benefits

The benefits of this modern approach are clear and compelling:

Metcalf Would Be Proud

It's doubtful that Bob Metcalf foresaw the modern Extranet as-a-Service forty years ago. But give him credit for predicting the underlying law that explains why extranets are indispensable in our modern era. Without the Extranet-as-a-Service, the enterprise couldn't keep pace with modern business practices.