What is XaaS?
XaaS stands for “Anything as a Service”. You may also have heard the term “SaaS”, which stands for “Software as a Service”. The term “XaaS” refers to the delivery of anything as a service. It recognises that the vast number of products, tools and technologies that vendors now deliver are delivered to users as a service over a network, typically the internet, rather than being provided locally or on-site within an enterprise.
Nowadays, software and programmes are increasingly being deployed via the cloud, rather than as an on-premise solution. This is thanks to the IT industry’s move towards XaaS (“anything as a service”).
Where Can We See Examples of the Move Towards XaaS?
Countless examples of XaaS are appearing within the IT industry all the time, but the most common examples tend to encompass three key cloud computing models: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
SaaS provides a wide range of software applications to users, such as Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce. PaaS offerings, such as Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine, typically provide preconfigured virtual machines and other resources for application development and testing. IaaS allows organisations to deploy and configure virtual machines, hosted in a vendor's data centre, and manage those virtual machines remotely. Examples of these services include Microsoft Azure and Google Compute.
Other examples of XaaS in practice include Storage as a Service (SaaS), whereby application, data and backup storage systems are provided in the cloud, or Database as a Service (DBaaS), which provides cloud-based access to a database platform.
What Does XaaS Mean for Business Technology?
Many believe that the IT industry’s move towards XaaS can provide two key benefits for businesses: lower operational costs and increased efficiencies.
When selecting and deploying software in your business, the as-a-service model can cut costs and simplify IT deployments. With every additional cloud service, a company can shed pieces of its in-house IT infrastructure, leading to fewer servers, hard drives, network switches, software deployments and so on.
Less on-premise IT means less physical overhead, such as equipment space, power and cooling. This in turn leads to reductions in IT staffing and firefighting, and frees up time to be focused on more important, long-term, value-added projects for the business, such as IT strategy development and execution. Because of this, the move towards XaaS should be considered in any business’s long-term IT strategy outline.
What is the Future of XaaS?
XaaS is a significant upwards trend that we wouldn’t expect to see easing off any time soon. The coming together of cloud computing and ubiquitous, high-bandwidth, global internet access (including the recent release of 5G technology in the UK) provides a fertile environment for XaaS growth in the future.
In the past, some businesses have been tentative to adopt XaaS as a result of uncertainties surrounding security, compliance and business governance concerns. However, service providers are increasingly addressing these concerns, meaning that we will likely see even more organisations migrating larger portions of their workload into the cloud over the coming years.
EPX Technical Services – Business Technology Consultants
To find out more about how a move towards XaaS might benefit your business, or to discuss your wider IT strategy, contact EPX Technical Services today on 01785 878 311, or email info@epx.co.uk.
