By 2026, multicloud networking is no longer something enterprises build one tunnel and one peering at a time. Instead, it is increasingly consumed as a service: on-demand, policy-driven, and tightly integrated with platform engineering and security operations. Network-as-a-service (NaaS) has moved from marketing buzzword to a practical operating model for connecting applications, users, and data across clouds, data centers, and the edge.

For organizations wrestling with AI workloads, regulatory pressure, and rising cloud bills, this shift is more than an infrastructure refresh. It is a strategic pivot away from owning and managing physical network gear toward renting programmable connectivity and security wherever needed, paid for as an operational expense and controlled through APIs.

Why multicloud is forcing a new connectivity model

By 2025, nearly 9 out of 10 enterprises will report having a multicloud strategy and will use an average of more than 3 cloud providers. SQ Magazine The promise is resilience, choice, and leverage with vendors. The reality, for many, is rising complexity in networking, security, and cost governance. Interconnecting all these environments using traditional private circuits, VPN appliances, and hand-crafted firewall rules creates an operational drag that becomes obvious as AI and data-intensive workloads scale.

Analyst research has underlined that multicloud and cross-cloud strategies are now pivotal to long-term cloud roadmaps but that more than half of multicloud implementations fail to deliver expected benefits because of interoperability and operational issues. Gartner As organizations adopt cloud-native development and experiment with edge and 5G, legacy networking approaches begin to look like a bottleneck. Provisioning private lines can still take weeks. Operations teams must maintain different skill sets, tooling, and runbooks for each provider’s networking stack. Troubleshooting end-to-end issues across multiple providers and on-prem infrastructure can consume days of engineering effort.

These pain points are amplified by the shift to real-time, distributed applications. AI inference services, event streaming platforms, and IoT data pipelines all assume that network connections can be quickly provisioned, centrally observed, and reliably secured. The old model of static, manually managed connections cannot keep up with this rate of change. That context sets the stage for NaaS to move into the mainstream of multicloud networking.

From DIY networks to NaaS: Renting the multicloud fabric

At its core, network-as-a-service is a cloud model in which organizations consume networking capabilities—connectivity, security, performance optimization, and monitoring—as subscription services rather than owning and operating the underlying infrastructure. Cisco, for example, defines NaaS as enabling users to operate networks and achieve desired outcomes without building or maintaining their own hardware, replacing traditional VPNs, load balancers, and MPLS circuits with software-defined services consumed on demand. Cisco  For multicloud networking, this means that instead of separately arranging dedicated interconnects to each provider, enterprises can use a global software-defined fabric that offers on-demand private connectivity to major clouds and data centers. Equinix Fabric and similar offerings provide flexible private connections to multiple clouds over a shared, programmable backbone, allowing traffic to bypass the public internet while scaling up and down as requirements change. Interconnections – The Equinix Blog

Other providers frame NaaS as “network on demand,” enabling enterprises to scale bandwidth, activate or tear down connections, and insert virtual security functions without long-term carrier contracts. Lumen, for instance, highlights multi-cloud integration use cases where customers quickly set up private cloud connections and adjust capacity as needed to control costs and avoid downtime. Lumen

By 2026, these NaaS fabrics will have become central to how enterprises implement multicloud networking. They expose APIs and consoles that allow teams to define endpoints, apply policies, and track usage. Under the hood, the provider handles peering, routing, redundancy, and physical operations. For customers, the value is the ability to treat connectivity as an elastic resource, like compute and storage.

Zero trust and identity-centric connectivity are baked into the fabric

As connectivity becomes easier to provision, security must keep pace. The move to NaaS does not replace the need for robust security; it simply shifts where and how security is enforced. In multicloud environments, Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) is increasingly recognized as the baseline model, particularly when workloads and users span multiple providers and locations. NIST’s guidance on zero trust emphasizes protecting resources directly rather than relying on trusted network segments, a principle that aligns neatly with multicloud topologies, where no single perimeter exists. NIST Publications

For NaaS, zero trust means that identity and device posture are evaluated at every connection, micro-segmentation replaces flat networks, and least-privilege policies follow workloads wherever they run. Providers and security platforms now offer practical frameworks for implementing zero trust across multicloud environments, combining identity-aware proxies, context-driven access control, and continuous verification for east-west traffic. Cyber Sierra

Unified security dashboards are emerging as a key feature in NaaS and multicloud networking solutions. Rather than managing security configurations in separate clouds and on-prem devices, security teams can define access policies and segmentation once in a centralized console. The NaaS platform then enforces these policies across its fabric and integrates with cloud-native security controls in the major platforms. This consolidation simplifies compliance, speeds incident response, and reduces the risk of misconfiguration drift across environments.

By 2026, many enterprises will also expect NaaS platforms to integrate with their identity and access management stack so that user and workload identities drive network policy directly. In this model, the network extends identity-centric security, dynamically authorizing traffic based on who or what is connecting, where, and under what conditions.

Platform engineering turns networking into a product

The rise of platform engineering is reshaping not only compute and storage, but also networking. Infrastructure Platform Engineering, as defined by practitioners, transforms infrastructure into a self-service product that developers and operators consume via clear interfaces and APIs. platformengineering.org

In 2026, the combination of NaaS and platform engineering means network services are treated like internal products. Platform teams curate “network bundles” that encode best practices for connecting new applications to specific clouds, edge regions, or partners. These bundles might define which NaaS endpoints to use, what security and QoS policies to apply, and how to expose observability data to SRE and security operations.

Developers and application teams no longer file tickets asking someone to “open a firewall port” or “set up an interconnect.” Instead, they request connectivity through self-service portals or directly via infrastructure-as-code pipelines. Underneath those workflows, the platform team’s abstractions drive calls into NaaS APIs and cloud-native networking services, guaranteeing that every new connection adheres to corporate policy and regulatory constraints.

This model also radically changes the change management process. Connectivity changes become code reviews rather than informal requests. Policy violations are surfaced by automated checks long before they reach production. GenAI assistants begin to play a more active role here as well, reading existing IaC repositories, suggesting standardized patterns for new projects, and highlighting deviations from security baselines before they are merged.

Edge, 5G, and NaaS: A new middle-mile

The surge in edge computing and 5G deployments is turning multicloud networking into a problem of connecting thousands of locations, not just a handful of core data centers and public cloud regions. AI at the edge, as seen in platforms designed to bring AI workloads closer to factories, hospitals, and retail sites, relies on high-performance, secure connectivity between those sites and centralized cloud or regional hubs. IT Pro

NaaS providers are responding by extending their fabrics to more edge data centers and telecom points of presence. For enterprises, this means that adding a new edge location can be as simple as configuring a new endpoint in the NaaS console and associating it with the appropriate cloud regions and security policies. The same routes that connect clouds to each other now also connect edge clusters, branch sites, and partner ecosystems.

This is particularly important for latency-sensitive use cases such as industrial automation, AR/VR, or autonomous systems. Instead of backhauling all traffic to a central data center over expensive private circuits, organizations can use NaaS to build regional overlays that keep critical traffic close to where it is generated and processed, only forwarding aggregated or non-urgent data back to core clouds. As 5G network slicing and private cellular deployments mature, these transport options will increasingly be integrated into NaaS offerings as configurable paths within the same control plane.

Economics, FinOps, and SLA-driven design

While NaaS promises to simplify operations, it also introduces a new cost model. Connectivity ceases to be a capital expense amortized over years. It becomes an ongoing subscription tied directly to usage. For many enterprises, this is attractive because it aligns with cloud operating models and avoids significant upfront investments. But it also requires tight alignment between network design and cloud financial operations.

FinOps practices, initially focused on compute and storage, are now expanding to cover network and NaaS spending. Cloud cost management teams are looking beyond egress fees to understand the full economics of multicloud data paths, including NaaS subscriptions, inter-region bandwidth, and virtual appliances. Multi-cloud trend reports emphasize that cost optimization and compliance are among the primary reasons enterprises pursue multicloud, but they also warn that unmanaged complexity can erode these benefits. Datacenters.com+2ScrumLaunch  By 2026, leading organizations will use joint dashboards where engineering, security, and finance can see both the performance and cost implications of connectivity decisions. NaaS usage data will feed into these views in near real time. This enables SLA-driven design choices: teams can decide whether a premium low-latency circuit is justified for a particular service, or whether a lower-cost route meets business needs. GenAI-powered analytics will help identify underutilized bandwidth, redundant paths, or opportunities to consolidate providers without sacrificing resilience.

These practices support more disciplined negotiations with NaaS vendors and cloud providers. They also make it easier to justify investments in high-quality connectivity for AI and data-intensive workloads where user experience and business outcomes depend on performance.

Innovating toward quantum-safe and sustainable NaaS

Looking slightly beyond 2026, two strategic themes stand out for multicloud NaaS: security in a post-quantum world and sustainability.

On the security side, standards bodies and vendors are steadily advancing post-quantum cryptography, with new algorithms being standardized and tested across industries. While widespread deployment may still be a few years away, enterprises designing NaaS-centric multicloud architectures today are increasingly concerned with crypto agility. They want assurance that the connectivity platforms they choose can adopt quantum-resistant algorithms and key management schemes once they are ready for production use, without requiring major redesigns.

This implies central control over certificate life cycles, policy-driven encryption standards, and the ability to roll out upgrades across all endpoints and clouds in a coordinated fashion. NaaS providers with global fabrics and unified control planes are well positioned to deliver these capabilities, especially when combined with zero-trust and identity-centric policies that already assume a dynamic security posture.

Sustainability is the other major force shaping NaaS evolution. Enterprises face growing pressure to report on and reduce the carbon footprint of their IT, including networks. Cloud sustainability research highlights how providers are investing in greener data centers and energy-efficient infrastructure, but enterprises still need visibility into the environmental impact of their own workloads and traffic patterns. Datacenters.com

Future-ready NaaS platforms will expose environmental metrics alongside performance and cost, allowing organizations to steer traffic along more sustainable paths where possible. Workload placement engines integrated with NaaS APIs will consider region-specific carbon intensity and renewable energy availability when choosing where to run AI models or store data. Over time, this will enable multicloud architectures where sustainability becomes an explicit optimization variable in routing and capacity planning, not just an after-the-fact report.

Closing thoughts and looking forward

Network-as-a-service is poised to become the default way enterprises deliver multicloud networking in 2026 and beyond. Instead of assembling bespoke networks from disparate circuits, appliances, and cloud-specific constructs, organizations can subscribe to a programmable global fabric and focus on expressing their business intent through policy.

The winning strategies will combine NaaS with strong platform engineering practices, zero trust security, and mature FinOps. Together, these disciplines turn connectivity into a managed product that is secure by design, cost-aware by default, and responsive to the needs of fast-moving development teams. As edge and AI workloads proliferate, NaaS will provide the “middle-mile” that ties clouds, data centers, and thousands of edge sites into a cohesive whole.

The next few years will also test which providers can evolve fastest toward quantum-safe, sustainability-aware connectivity, and which enterprises can make the cultural shift to treat networking as code and policy rather than hardware and static configuration. Those that succeed will be able to move workloads freely across clouds and regions, confident that the network will follow, adapt, and protect them wherever their business takes them.

References

2025 Cloud in Review: 6 Trends to Watch – Cloud Data Insights – https://www.clouddatainsights.com/2025-cloud-in-review-6-trends-to-watch/ CDInsights

Gartner Identifies the Top Trends Shaping the Future of Cloud – Gartner – https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-05-13-gartner-identifies-top-trends-shaping-the-future-of-cloud Gartner

What Is Network as a Service (NaaS)? – Cisco – https://www.cisco.com/site/us/en/learn/topics/networking/what-is-network-as-a-service-naas.html Cisco

3 Multicloud Network Designs for Simplified Multicloud Connectivity – Equinix Blog – https://blog.equinix.com/blog/2025/08/13/3-multicloud-network-designs-for-simplified-multicloud-connectivity/ Interconnections – The Equinix Blog

Cloud Adoption Statistics 2025: Growth, Migration Drivers, ROI – SQ Magazine – https://sqmagazine.co.uk/cloud-adoption-statistics/ SQ Magazine

Co-Editor, Benoit Tremblay, IT Security Management, Montreal, Quebec;
Peter Jonathan Wilcheck, Co-Editor, Miami, Florida.

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