Zayo’s DynamicLink looks to break NaaS adoption barriers 

The new offering provides enterprise customers with more visibility and control over how they consume and provision services.
Oct. 7, 2025
4 min read

Key Highlights

  • DynamicLink provides real-time network configuration, allowing businesses to turn up, scale, and manage connections across multiple locations without physical equipment.
  • The platform features built-in security and holistic observability, enabling comprehensive monitoring and threat detection for enterprise applications.
  • An industry-first GenAI agent facilitates service provisioning through natural language commands, simplifying complex network management tasks.
  • Zayo plans to expand its as-a-service offerings, aiming to deliver more intelligent, easy-to-use networking solutions aligned with market growth forecasts.
  • Experts highlight the importance of self-service portals, strong network management, and flexible pricing models to stand out in the competitive NaaS market.

Zayo is taking on the NaaS market with its software-based DynamicLink offering, focusing on automated network capabilities.

Offering built-in security and observability, DynamicLink leverages a software-defined platform that overlays Zayo’s entire network footprint — including 28,000 on-net locations and 1,200 on-net data centers.

DynamicLink combines its vast network reach with an AI-driven interface. Zayo said it can make the experience simpler, smarter, and faster. This agility has never been more critical as AI adoption and market volatility accelerate.

Bill Long, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Zayo, said the DynamicLink offering speaks to the need for businesses to adapt to changes on the fly. “Today's organizations aren't just future-proofing, they're chaos-proofing,” he said. “With market forces shifting overnight, they need a network experience that moves as quickly as their business. That's what we're delivering with DynamicLink. Not a vision or a possibility of NaaS, but a real, intelligent solution that delivers the control, agility, and ease our customers need."  

On-demand focus

A key element of the DynamicLink is giving businesses the ability to turn up, scale, and manage their networks in real-time over the service provider’s growing set of network facilities.

Zayo said an IT manager can turn up a 1G, 10G, or 100G connection, scale up and down bandwidth, and add on security services in a single self-service platform.

The service provider offers five main on-demand capabilities:

  • Real-Time Network Configuration: Enterprise customers can turn up and scale network connectivity services — DIA, Ethernet, Cloudlink, and IP-VPN — at any location the network reaches, including clouds, on-net locations, and type 2 off-net sites. Once connected, all network services are configurable directly through the DynamicLink platform, with no on-premise physical equipment required. 

  • Self-Service Management: Manage network configurations, bandwidth allocation, cloud connectivity, and more directly through the platform, without manual provisioning or service tickets.  

  • Built-In Security: Protect applications and data with enterprise-grade security built in, without the need for separate appliances. 

  • Holistic observability: Monitor network performance across applications, traffic paths, and connections with built-in geolocation mapping, threat visibility, and security policy controls. 

  • AI Agent: Businesses can Zayo’s GenAI agent to provision services with plain-language commands (“add a 5Gbps connection between Chicago and AWS”) or surface knowledge and procedures across internal and external systems.  

Enterprises can get access to these capabilities through software-based interfaces.

Roy Chua, founder and industry Analyst at AvidThink, said DynamicLink offers the “comprehensive yet accessible approach the market has been demanding.”

"The NaaS market has been plagued by a fundamental disconnect—solutions were either useful or usable, but not both,” he said. “Many platforms offered reach but required complex implementation, while simpler solutions were limited in scope. DynamicLink represents a shift in this dynamic. The combination of Zayo's extensive footprint with easy-to-use self-service capabilities and AI-assisted provisioning addresses both sides of this equation.”

Ongoing expansion

DynamicLink may be a major element of Zayo’s NaaS strategy, but it certainly isn’t its last.  

While it has not specified what will be next, Zayo noted it will continue expanding its as-a-service capabilities to deliver on its ambition of making networking easy and intelligent.  

This comes at a time when industry watchers are forecasting growth in the nascent NaaS market.

In its Network as a service (NaaS): worldwide forecast 2025–2029, Analysys Mason predicts that NaaS connectivity revenue worldwide, including revenue from both retail and wholesale connectivity, will grow at a CAGR of 42% between 2024 and 2029 to reach $14.7 billion.

Despite the potential of NaaS, the research firm cautions that service providers need to make sure they have a full offering to stand out in what it says is a “crowded” market.

Joseph Attwood, Senior Analyst for Analysys Mason, said that providers need to offer “self-service portals with strong network management, fault detection and response, observability and analytics capabilities” as well as “comprehensive marketplaces for Layer 3–7 overlay and other IT services, and should improve their support for proprietary and/or (preferably) standardized APIs to enable enterprises to manage their connectivity.”

He added that service providers could ease adoption issues by giving enterprise customers a “walk-before-you-run” approach. “This may involve supporting more-traditional, long-term contracts alongside pay-as-you-go pricing models for NaaS,” he said. “Additionally, service providers can support both co-managed and fully managed NaaS for enterprises that do not want the complexity of managing NaaS via a self-service model.”

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About the Author

Sean Buckley

Sean is responsible for establishing and executing the editorial strategy of Lightwave across its website, email newsletters, events, and other information products.

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