MEF announced the availability of its 2025 NaaS Industry Blueprint during the MEF GNE event in Dallas.
Telecom Review Americas was at the event in full force, with our team from Latin America and South America meeting attendees and providing emcee support.
On the stage of GNE 2024 (From L to R) Kevin Vachon, COO, MEF; Toni Eid, CEO and Founder of Telecom Review Group; Daniel Bar-Lev, CPO, MEF
“Our 2025 NaaS Industry Blueprint unites industry stakeholders around a shared vision for NaaS and serves as a comprehensive guide for service providers to develop, deliver, and manage NaaS offerings within a standards-based automated ecosystem,” said blueprint author Stan Hubbard, Principal Analyst, MEF. “In the coming months, we will deepen collaboration across the ecosystem to unlock the market’s full potential and meet the surging enterprise demand for high-performance, AI-driven, and cloud-optimized networks.”
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Key Areas of the 2025 NaaS Industry Blueprint
Enterprises are increasingly turning to NaaS to address key digital transformation priorities, including enhanced cybersecurity, cloud migration, and support for AI and GenAI workloads. MEF's 2025 NaaS Industry Blueprint highlights how GenAI’s rapid rise has unlocked new NaaS-related revenue opportunities for service providers, particularly in multi-cloud environments.
The 2025 NaaS Industry Blueprint serves as a foundational resource for service providers, cloud providers, technology suppliers, and other ecosystem participants, emphasizing the need for collaboration across multiple fronts to maximize market opportunities. The blueprint identifies key areas for alignment and collaboration, providing progress updates to guide companies in these efforts, including:
- Unified Definition of NaaS: Establishes a clear definition of NaaS integrating on-demand connectivity, application assurance, cybersecurity, and multi-cloud networking within an automated ecosystem.
- Key NaaS Features: Identifies 36 key features, including 20 essential customer-facing features highlighted in MEF’s NaaS Customer Experience white paper.
- NaaS Use Cases: Explores customer requirements and service provider solutions for four core NaaS use cases—on-demand connectivity, SD-WAN, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), and multi-cloud connectivity.
- NaaS Automated Ecosystem: Reports progress on the NaaS automated ecosystem built on standardized services and Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) APIs that automate business and operational functions between ecosystem participants.
Related: MEF Launches First Network-as-a-Service Industry Blueprint
The blueprint also highlights MEF's ongoing efforts to extend NaaS capabilities to enterprise customers, enabling organizations to leverage standardized MEF LSO APIs for greater control, flexibility, and visibility into their network environments. MEF’s recently released NaaS Customer Experience white paper identifies what enterprises can expect from NaaS offerings, including cloud-like scalability, dynamic connectivity, real-time performance insights, and enhanced cybersecurity.
MEF's testing and certification programs play a pivotal role in accelerating NaaS adoption by building trust and ensuring interoperability within the ecosystem. These Certification programs validate that service and technology providers meet the stringent requirements for delivering automation-ready NaaS services.
As of October 2024, 15 technology and service providers have achieved MEF 3.0 certification for SASE and SD-WAN. Growing industry commitment to certified and standardized services provides enterprises and service providers with the confidence to invest in and deploy NaaS solutions at scale.
