Campus NaaS: Remaking the Campus Network

Campus networks have existed for decades, but they are getting a makeover to meet changes in the way users work and companies operate today. Simply put, today’s connectivity and security requirements in academic, commercial, and public sector environments have outpaced the capabilities of traditional campus networks. A campus Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) approach is emerging, offering more flexibility, simplified management, and enhanced cybersecurity.

A renewed interest in Campus NaaS

What’s changed to drive this interest in Campus NaaS? First, the core reason for campus networks has evolved. In the past, a campus network gave students and employees easy access to an organization’s applications, data, and computing resources. Now, the overwhelming use of cloud services and SaaS applications requires high-speed, highly available, and secure connections from within an organization to these outside resources.

A second issue is the need to protect against sophisticated cyber threats. In the past, an enterprise could erect firewalls and employ other technologies to isolate their campus networks and keep operations safe. Now, many cyberattacks only need to infiltrate a single user’s system to wreak havoc from within. As such, there is a greater need for zero trust network access.

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While there are variants of campus NaaS, many providers try to address both issues above in an as-a-service model. There is great interest in such an approach. Earlier this year, the Dell’Oro Group released a report on the market projecting that Campus Network-as-a-Service (CNaaS) revenues will double this year.

And more interest is expected going forward. “The next wave of high growth in the LAN equipment market will come from CNaaS,” said Siân Morgan, Wireless LAN Research Director at Dell’Oro Group, in a release. 

The need for a modern CNaaS

Taking a reflective look back at the market illustrates what’s needed to support today’s enterprise users.

The idea of a campus NaaS has been talked about for the last 12 to 15 years, and there have been many attempts at it. Unfortunately, the offerings had many shortcomings. “What’s been offered is a lipstick on a pig where they took existing hardware and existing software, put in monitoring and management, and sold it as a service,” said Nile’s Co-founder and CPO, Suresh Katukam. (Katukam's comments came in a podcast interview with MEF CTO Pascal Menezes.) “Effectively what they did was tell enterprises ‘You don't need to have your IT team; we'll manage it for you.’”

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He notes that this approach did not deliver NaaS as the industry thinks of it today. Those past attempts have led many in the industry to start from scratch, building their own hardware and software for their campus NaaS offerings.

Companies have had to do this because when a provider delivers NaaS, the service has to deliver guaranteed enterprise-level performance and availability. And increasingly, there is a need to bundle security. As such, new NaaS providers like Join, Meter, Nile, Shasta Cloud, and others have entered the market and joined traditional networking companies (e.g., HPE) with campus NaaS offerings.

Why NaaS?

There are several benefits to leveraging NaaS as the foundation of a campus network infrastructure. One is that many advanced IP-based services like SD-WAN, SASE, and more can be deployed using NaaS as the infrastructure component of an offering.

Furthermore, many NaaS offerings tout enhanced security by including support for zero trust network access (ZTNA), encryption, secure web gateways (SWG), firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS), cloud access security brokers (CASB), and more.

Campus NaaS use cases emerge

Sunil Khandekar, Chief Enterprise Development Officer at MEF, sees two enterprise campus NaaS use cases that stand out.

One is the use of campus NaaS for multinational companies' remote offices. "Many remote offices of branches often do not have the same IT capabilities as headquarters," said Khandekar. (His comments came in a NextGenInfra video.) Using a campus NaaS offering allows for a hybrid approach, where a multinational company would use campus NaaS for its smaller remote offices and maintain its own oversight of the enterprise network in the corporate office.

Another emerging use case is with mid-sized companies that have relied heavily on managed services. A campus NaaS offering would align with that approach, offloading network CapEx spending to a provider while also relying on that provider to manage and secure the network and incorporate the latest technologies as they emerge.