Do you know what XaaS is? The evolution of cloud computing

The term XaaS was created with the idea of expressing "anything as a service" or "everything as a service." This acronym refers to a growing number of services that are delivered over the Internet instead of being provided locally. XaaS is becoming part of the essence of Cloud Computing.

Cloud 25 May 2024 5 min read By: Skyone

The most common examples of XaaS are Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). The combined use of these three is sometimes referred to as the SPI model (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS).

What do you mean by everything as a service?

The term Software as a Service (SaaS), a well-known concept today, refers to an Application Service Provider (ASP) that hosts software that can be accessed from anywhere. This type of application was primarily driven by the concept of cloud computing, which allowed other types of activities to be offered as a service, in addition to software.

From there, other "aaS" models emerged addressing areas such as communication, infrastructure, monitoring, and platform. What they all have in common is the "on-demand" nature of their offerings.

The on-demand model has been well received by the market because it works on a usage basis; if you use the service for 2 hours a month, you only pay for that time. As companies experiment with this workflow, the use of on-demand services redefines traditional concepts of technology acquisition.

A study by Fortune Business Insights projects that the global Everything as a Service (XaaS) market will grow from $545 billion in 2022 to over $2.3 trillion by 2030, driven primarily by the digitalization of sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, and finance.

The XaaS model for new services available

One of the most interesting XaaS offerings is Monitoring as a Service (MaaS), which involves maintaining your infrastructure in the cloud and having automatic monitoring for your systems and services. An example of the MaaS model is the Sky.Saver , which enables savings on infrastructure costs for those using AWS.

Communication as a Service (CaaS) is a term used for various related telephony services. Under the CaaS umbrella we have Voice over IP (VoIP), also known as Voice as a Service (VaaS), Remote Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), Private Branch Exchange (PBX), among others.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), also widely known thanks to Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service, involves virtualized servers and their resources (CPU, memory, and disk space) being dynamically allocated and scaled based on usage.

Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is a cloud service where the back-end infrastructure is hosted by a cloud service provider. It has an architecture where the DaaS provider handles data storage, backup, security, and updates, and user data is copied and made available from virtual desktops when users log on and also when they log off.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is where a company, not necessarily a cloud provider, replicates and hosts your physical or virtual servers to provide failover in case of a disaster. Sometimes, this provider will host your data in the cloud. It is especially useful for SMEs that lack the infrastructure, technology, or qualified personnel to implement an on-premises disaster recovery plan.

Advantages of the XaaS model

One of the advantages of the on-demand model, and more specifically XaaS, is the possibility for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to compete with larger companies. By using these on-demand services, SMEs can compete using a fraction of the cost that would be necessary to invest in purchasing hardware, software, and experienced personnel to configure and maintain these services.

Another advantage is the ease of acquiring a complete range of services and being able to create a completely virtual company. Where does your company exist? Everywhere.

Everything as a service is a good idea and is far from being just theory; XaaS can help various types of businesses with low initial investment and reduced start-up time. All this with good planning and a well-defined architecture serving the operational strategy of companies.

In addition to scalability and cost reduction, the XaaS model also fosters continuous innovation . This is because vendors update their solutions regularly, ensuring that companies have access to the latest technologies without operational interruptions. Another advantage is the simplified compliance model , as many XaaS solutions follow international security and privacy regulations by default.

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