Organizations have traditionally invested significant resources in IT specialists to design, build, and operate their networking infrastructure, a labor-intensive experience connecting everyone with various physical devices or everything, all accessing applications within a Data Center or a Cloud service.  

In October 2021, Gartner defined NaaS as a delivery model for network functionality as a service and included the following capabilities:

• Self-service capability
• On-demand usage
• Elasticity: scale up or down
• Consumption is based on a metered metric such as ports, throughput, or users, not on network devices or appliances
• Billed on an OPEX model

NaaS offerings may include many elements, such as network switches, wireless access points, routers, gateways, firewalls, and software.