You flip open your laptop, launch your browser, and start working—blissfully unaware of the complex dance happening behind the scenes to make this possible.

As you access files in the cloud, join online meetings, and use SaaS apps, two key developments in enterprise networking converge to enable your seamless digital experience: Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE).

But what exactly do these terms mean, and how do they relate? This blog will bring you up to speed on how NaaS relates to SASE, where they converge, and what it all means for your business and its network. Let’s jump in.

The Rise of NaaS

Remember when enterprises had to purchase, install, and manage networking hardware like routers and switches? Those days are fading fast. With NaaS, you can now consume networking across a vast area network (WAN) as a cloud service, just like SaaS.

NaaS has unlocked several benefits:

Agility: Scale connectivity up or down to meet your needs without costly hardware. Add a new office in minutes.
Cost Savings: Pay only for what you use instead of overprovisioning resources. Operational costs are replaced with a per-user subscription.
Simplicity: Instead of managing complex hardware and software, you can automate and analyze your network with a few clicks.

As you look at legacy networks, you realize how much hardware and manual effort used to be required just to route traffic for a distributed workforce. NaaS has changed the game.

The Limitations of DIY Networking

In the past, companies had to invest in networking equipment, from routers to switches, configure policies and protocols, and manage installations and updates. This required dedicated in-house IT staff to install, monitor, and maintain networks, and costs quickly ballooned out of control.

With dispersed offices and remote employees accessing cloud apps, legacy networks are strained to provide secure, high-performance connectivity. Latency, jitter, and lack of visibility into network behavior created huge challenges.

Troubleshooting issues was painful, like finding the source of packet loss between different network segments. Hours turned to days spent correlating log files and config backups, trying to pinpoint where the breakdown occurred.

As traffic patterns became more dynamic, the static nature of hardware-centric networks couldn’t adjust. Adding new offices meant truck rolls for equipment and manual configuration. Change requests like adding subnets or VLANs took weeks of planning and testing.

Network disruptions had outsized impacts, yet locating the problem and implementing fixes was slow. The infrastructure needed to be built for the flexibility demands of modern business.

How NaaS Changes the Game

NaaS solutions shift networking to the cloud, providing access to enterprise-grade connectivity and features as a subscription service. Businesses can deploy software-defined networks managed through a central dashboard.

With NaaS:

Agility is baked in – Spin up new networks in minutes, not months
Costs shift – Move from CapEx to more flexible OpEx
Workforces are untethered – Secure and optimize remote access
Innovation accelerates – Leverage cloud scale and automation

Now, companies can adjust network capacity on demand to support shifts in business needs or traffic spikes from new offices coming online. Changes take effect programmatically instead of manually.

Networking teams leverage sophisticated analytics with machine learning-driven insights to optimize traffic, resolve preemptive issues, and improve cloud application performance.

What is SASE?

While NaaS transformed the LAN, SASE (pronounced “sassy”) is revolutionizing the WAN. SASE converges networking and network security into a single, cloud-native service model to securely connect users, devices, and locations across various edges – from mobile devices to branch offices to public clouds.

The core components of a SASE architecture include:

SD-WAN: Software-defined networking across the WAN to route traffic with automation and intelligence
SWG: Secure web gateway to protect users and control access
ZTNA: Zero trust network access to validate identity and device health before granting access
FWaaS: Cloud-delivered firewall as a service instead of hardware firewalls

As you adopt SaaS apps and move to hybrid workplaces, SASE becomes the secure networking model you need to enable your distributed workforce.

The Evolution to SASE

IT departments traditionally deployed a mosaic of different point security products. For example, remote users are connected via VPN appliances. Data centers housed racks of hardware firewalls. Offices used proxy servers to filter and log web traffic.

As workforces and applications were distributed to more edges, this model proved inefficient:

Separate security stack for locations/users created fragmentation
Backhauling traffic through centralized hubs added latency
Licensing and managing all the disparate tools was complex and costly

The philosophy behind SASE aims to consolidate networking and security into a cloud-native model. Delivering security from globally distributed points of presence removes the need for traffic backhaul while ensuring consistent, robust protection across all edges.

The goal is to shift from securing the network perimeter to securing the identity of users and devices attempting access – in other words, zero trust. Verifying contextual factors before granting access prevents lateral movement across networks in case of compromise.

This inside-out approach wraps security around individual users, applications, and resources instead of the network core.

Convergence is Here

In the future of networking, NaaS can be considered the “what” and SASE the “how.” While NaaS provides the networking infrastructure itself as a service, SASE defines the cloud-centric model for securely connecting distributed users to their applications.

Together, NaaS combined with a SASE architecture powered by critical principles of zero trust and defender advantage is ushering in a new era of networking. It is one where you don’t have to worry about the underlying technology and can instead focus on your core business or mission.

The Power of Converged Solutions

As networking and security converge in the cloud with offerings like NaaS and SASE, several powerful advantages emerge for modern enterprises:

Resiliency – Risk is reduced by distributing functionality across cloud nodes rather than centralized data centers. Workloads can shift seamlessly during disruptions to avoid outages.
Position of leverage: Security embedded in the network fabric provides visibility and control over all traffic, allowing faster detection of attacks and breaches.
Elasticity – Cloud-native solutions flexibly scale up and down to accommodate needs instead of relying on fixed hardware capacity requiring long lead times.
Simplicity – Consolidating tools, data, and dashboards streamlines operations. Less complex environments improve security posture as there’s less to manage.
Unity of direction – Aligning networking and security strategies aids coordination between IT teams. Friction is removed when working towards shared objectives.

As legacy models give way to cloud-first architectures, the convergence of NaaS and SASE promises to offer a more straightforward, more agile way to enable digital business across distributed footprints.

Final Word

It’s an exciting time in enterprise networking. As on-prem data centers get eclipsed by the cloud and mobile becomes the dominant platform for work, how networks are built, managed, and secured requires a paradigm shift.

The convergence of NaaS and SASE presents an opportunity to transform legacy network infrastructure, which is holding back initiatives like cloud adoption, hybrid workplaces, customer experience improvements, and more. The technology exists to make this vision of agile, protected, simplified networking a reality.

Read more:
The Convergence of NaaS and SASE: A New Era of Networking