Visibility Gaps Stall Enterprise Network-as-a-Service

A survey of enterprises finds observability and audit control, not cost alone, are the main barriers to adopting cloud-delivered network services.

Updated on Nov. 5, 2026 in Telecommunications

Visibility Gaps Stall Enterprise Network-as-a-Service

Live Poll

Do you trust large companies to deliver the reliability and transparency they promise?

GTT Communications released a white paper on enterprise adoption of network-as-a-service (NaaS) and managed network services (MNS), based on a survey conducted by Hanover Research. The findings are survey-based and describe enterprise attitudes rather than a shipped product; the white paper itself is a research report, not a product launch.

Why it matters

Enterprises are weighing NaaS against traditional managed networking, and the survey suggests that observability, auditability and encryption-key control are the gating concerns, more than price alone. The results point to where network providers will need to compete as cloud-style network services spread.

The white paper reports survey percentages rather than measured network performance, so no throughput or latency benchmarks are available. The survey also reports that NaaS offers a 30% lower five-year total cost of ownership, but the baseline for that comparison is not specified in the source.

The players

GTT Communications

GTT Communications is a network services provider that released the white paper, positioning itself within the managed and cloud networking market.

Hanover Research

Hanover Research is a research firm that conducted the enterprise survey underlying the white paper's findings.

The details

NaaS is defined in the survey as an on-demand, cloud-native fabric for provisioning and disconnecting networking services such as SD-WAN (software-defined wide area networking, which routes traffic across branch offices over software rather than fixed hardware) and SASE (secure access service edge, a cloud-delivered bundle of network and security controls). Observability — the ability to see inside a network's performance and behavior in real time — emerged as the main barrier, with respondents also wanting provider-maintained immutable logs (tamper-resistant records of network activity) to support audits. The survey also found that 37% of enterprises prefer AI-driven automated remediation, meaning software that detects and fixes performance problems without human intervention.

November 5, 2026: GTT Communications releases the white paper on enterprise adoption of NaaS and MNS.

The Tech Race

The findings place NaaS within the wider push to deliver SD-WAN and SASE as cloud services, where providers compete on how much visibility and control customers keep. Survey results that favor provider-maintained logs and customer-held encryption keys suggest the competitive line is moving toward verifiable transparency rather than raw capacity.

Enterprise IT leaders evaluating network upgrades can use the survey's criteria, such as observability, audit evidence and encryption-key control, when comparing providers. The findings do not indicate pricing or availability changes for end users.

The takeaway

Enterprises are signaling that observability and audit guarantees will decide NaaS purchases as much as cost. Watch whether GTT and other providers respond with published logging and key-management commitments in their next product releases.