Everything/Anything As A Service, XaaS is a combined term that refers to the delivery of anything as a service. It includes any number of products, tools, and technologies that vendors deliver to users as a service over a network. Over the Internet—as an alternative to providing them locally or on-site to an enterprise.

XaaS offerings can be scaled up or down, with IT services provided on demand by a managed service provider. Many service providers offer flexible consumption and payment models instead of the traditional purchase or license model. It requires fixed, upfront payments regardless of usage volume.

Examples of XaaS

The three common examples of XaaS are the following:

• SaaS: It includes a variety of applications, such as Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365, and Salesforce.

• PaaS: PaaS providers provide hardware and software tools to users over the Internet. PaaS offerings, such as Amazon Web Services Elastic Beanstalk, Apache Stratos, Google App Engine, and Salesforce’s Heroku and Salesforce platforms. It typically provides preconfigured virtual machines and other resources for application development and testing.

• IaaS: It is a model where a cloud provider provides IT infrastructure. It includes storage, servers, and networking resources, over the Internet to customers on a subscription basis. Examples of IaaS are AWS Elastic Compute Cloud, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure.

The other examples are:

• Authentication as a Service, or AaaS, uses cloud services for identity and access administration.
• Containers as a Service, or CaaS, enables the distribution and administration of containers using container-based virtualization.
• Database as a Service, or DBaaS, provides access to a database platform through the cloud. DBaaS offerings by Public cloud providers like AWS and Azure.
• A device as a Service, or DaaS, is when a third-party vendor provides PCs, smartphones, and other mobile computing devices as a paid service.
• Disaster recovery as a service, or DRaaS, helps organizations regain functionality after a disaster.

Functions as a Service, or FaaS, enables cloud customers to develop applications, deploy functionalities, and charge only when the functionality is executed.

Malware as a Service, or MaaS, is a type of security SaaS that helps protect organizations from ransomware on the public cloud, and distributed denial-of-service VMware AppDefense is an example of MaaS.

SaaS vs XaaS

Software as a Service (SaaS) is an early example of a delivery model as a service. SaaS and XaaS both refer to the delivery of cloud service.

• Everything/Anything As A Service, XaaS is the more general term. There are many various types of XaaS deployment models. The three common are SaaS, Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

• SaaS is a cloud-based software delivery model in which a cloud provider hosts applications. Moreover, it provides them to users over the Internet as a service. It is one of the three main cloud computing deployment models. There are many types of XaaS.

Benefits And Challenges

Benefits:

Following are some of the main benefits of XaaS:

• Effective cost: Cloud service models cut costs and simplify IT deployment. Organizations cut down on their IT infrastructure by using fewer servers, hard drives, network switches, and software deployments in their data centers.

• Low physical overhead: Service means less physical overhead, such as space, power, and cooling. This translates to reductions in IT staff and enables IT to focus on more important projects and business processes. Additionally, the use of external services instead of deploying on-premises technology shifts many capital expenditures to operating expenses.

• Technical support: With Everything/Anything As A Service, XaaS, the third-party provider staffs provisioning, service maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting. As a result, customers can lower their own on-premises support personnel.

• Measurability: The services can be increased or decreased depending on the needs of the business.

Challenges:

XaaS business challenges are the following:

• Flexibility and Internet reliability: Customers depend on the XaaS provider’s infrastructure; Service interruption is a potential issue.

• Visibility: Customers have limited visibility and control over the service provider’s environment and infrastructure.

• Vendor lock-in and dependency: Customers depend on the service provider to provide continuous service. However, providers may go out of business, be acquired, discontinue a service or change its features at any time.

• Security: If a provider experiences a security breach, user data is put at risk.

• Hidden Fees: Despite the convenience of the pay-as-you-go model. However, XaaS users may encounter hidden or unexpected costs when working with a cloud provider.

The future market for XaaS

The combination of cloud computing and ubiquitous, high-bandwidth, global Internet access bodes well for the growth of XaaS. However, XaaS is going mainstream as a business model as customers bring more workloads to the cloud.

The XaaS market is projected to grow from $437 billion in 2021 to $2.4 trillion in 2029. However, some organizations are hesitant to adopt XaaS because of security, compliance, and governance concerns. 

5G – and, in the future, 6G – the convergence of edge computing, big data, artificial intelligence, automation, machine learning, and the Internet of Things has contributed to the shift to the XaaS model and the cloud in common. As businesses need to process more information, it becomes less economically feasible to host computing services on campus. While, this has led businesses, across many industry sectors, to incorporate the cloud as part of their digital transformation.

About Us:

TCI (Tricolor Initiative) EaaS offering helps clients with real-world insights and ideas to make their operating models more agile and develop sustainable businesses as a service that will scale. We provide market-proven strategies, personalized proposal development, detailed capability assessments, and actionable roadmap recommendations. We also design innovative user experiences, live products, frictionless transaction systems, and best-in-class operating model capabilities. All these are essential to the success of these models and our customers.