This category covers the central management of network equipment: firewalls, switches and wifi, network access control (NAC), load balancing, and DNS, DHCP and IP address management (IPAM). Network teams use it to roll out policy, segment traffic and see who or what is on the network. Cisco Meraki and Palo Alto Networks are well-known non-European reference points.
What is special is that a management environment, often a cloud dashboard, determines the configuration of all these devices. Whoever can reach it can allow, reroute or cut off traffic. If the cloud service fails or is terminated, devices that depend on it can become unmanageable. Firmware updates also come from the vendor, so the update chain is part of your attack surface. DNS and DHCP logs reveal which systems and services your organisation uses. NIS2 counts digital infrastructure among its covered sectors and requires risk-management measures.
When choosing a European option, look for a management option you host yourself, devices that keep working without a cloud connection, a transparent and signed update process, standard protocols and log export to your own monitoring, and the absence of mandatory telemetry.