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The term XaaS was created with the idea of expressing the “anything as a service” or “everything as a service”. This acronym refers to a growing number of services that are delivered over the Internet rather than provided locally. XaaS comes to be part of the essence of Cloud Computing.
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 everything as a service?
The term Software as a Service (SaaS), a well-known concept today, refers to an Application Service Provider (ASP), which hosts software that can be accessed from anywhere. This type of application was mainly driven by the concept of cloud computing, which allowed other types of activities to be offered as a service in addition to software .
From then on, 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 was well accepted by the market because it works based on usage, if you use the service for 2 hours a month, you only pay for 2 hours of use. As companies experiment with this workflow, the use of the service begins to reflect a change in concepts related to services.
The XaaS model for new services available
One of the most interesting XaaS offerings is Monitoring as a Service (MaaS), which consists of keeping your infrastructure located in the cloud and having automatic monitoring of your systems and services. An example of the MaaS model is the Sky.Saver , which makes it possible to save infrastructure costs for those using AWS.
Communication as a Service (CaaS), is a term used for various telephony related services. Under the CaaS umbrella we have Voice over IP (VoIP), also known as Voice as a Service (VaaS), Automatic Remote Call Distribution (ACD), automatic exchange of private extensions (Private Branch Exchange – PBX), between others.
Infrastructure as a Service ( IaaS), also well known thanks to Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service. Where virtualized servers and their resources (CPU, memory and disk space), are dynamically allocated and scaled based on usage.
Desktop as a Service (DaaS), is a cloud service where the backend infrastructure is hosted by a cloud service provider. It has an architecture where the DaaS provider takes care of data storage, backup, security and updates responsibilities, and user data is copied and made available from the virtual desktops when they log on and also when they log off.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), where a company, not necessarily a cloud provider, replicates and hosts your physical or virtual servers to give you failover in the event of a disaster. Sometimes this provider will host your data in the cloud. It's especially useful for SMBs that don't have the infrastructure, technology, or qualified personnel to implement an on-site disaster and recovery plan.
Advantages of the XaaS model
Among the advantages of the on-demand model, and more specifically XaaS, is the possibility for small and medium-sized companies to compete with larger ones. SMBs using these on-demand services can compete using a fraction of the cost it would take to invest in purchasing the hardware, software and experienced staff to set up and maintain these services.
Another advantage is the ease of acquiring a complete array 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 far from just in theory, XaaS can help in many types of businesses with low initial investment and reduced time to start. All with good planning and a well-defined architecture at the service of the companies' operational strategy.
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