What is XaaS (Anything as a Service)?

Introduction

XaaS is a collective term for Anything as a Service. XaaS is sometimes also referred to as Everything as a Service. XaaS is an umbrella term that encompasses products, tools, and technologies provided by cloud vendors as services to users over the internet on a subscription basis.

Essentially, any IT function such as Security, Storage, Database, etc. can be transformed into a service to be consumed by enterprises. The pricing of these services depends on flexible consumption rather than upfront pricing or licensing. XaaS withholds primary service models IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS and also deals with other functions that are converted as services such as Disaster Recovery as a Service, Function as a Service, Authentication as a Service, etc.

Therefore, the core idea of Anything as a Service is that businesses can cut costs and get specific resources by purchasing services from the service providers on a subscription basis.

Before XaaS and cloud services, organizations have to buy licensed products, install them, provision all the security on their site, and provide infrastructure for business purposes. With the introduction of XaaS, organizations have the advantage to access any service (products, tools, technologies, etc) from the cloud service provider and paying only for what they need.

Using multi-tenant approaches, cloud services can provide a lot of flexibility to users. Resource pooling and rapid elasticity allow organizations to add or subtract services as needed. Generally, XaaS services are governed by Service Level Agreement (SLA), where the client and provider work together to decide how the services will be provided.

Anything as a Service provides various advantages for organizations. Let us discuss some of these benefits.

What are the Benefits of XaaS?

Apart from providing such a wide variety of services to the users. Anything as a service inherently provides some advantages to organizations. Some of the primary benefits are:

• Cost and Time Effective - Cloud service models cut costs by reducing the organization's IT infrastructure, using less number of servers, network switches, and storage units. The organization does not have to buy an unnecessary license and pay upfront costs since they can utilize that service from cloud vendors for the required time and pay as they go. Moreover, the development time is reduced by easy accessibility to all the cloud services.
• Focus on Business Processes by Minimised Physical Overhead - Using cloud services means less physical infrastructure on-site and less physical overhead such as space, power, cooling, etc. This allows organizations to focus more on important projects and business processes to provide better services to the users and improved customer experience. Moreover, using third-party services rather than deploying on-premise technology shifts much capital expenditure to operational expenditure.
• Scalability - Like other service models, services can easily be scaled up or down based on the need.
• Technical Support - Third-party service providers or cloud vendors maintain, upgrade and troubleshoot the service. As a result, the service user can reduce their on-premise support personnel.

What are the Disadvantages of XaaS?

Accompanied by all the pros; XaaS also have disadvantages that organization using with XaaS model have to deal with. Following are a few cons of XaaS:

• Downtime due to Internet reliability - Possible losses in Internet connection pose a threat to the consistent delivery of services. With XaaS, there can be issues with internet reliability, resilience, provisioning, and managing the infrastructural resources. XaaS providers can guarantee services by Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• Less internal visibility - Users have very limited visibility and control of the service provider environment.
• Vendor Lock-in - Customers completely rely on cloud vendors to provide services. If a cloud vendor discontinues or changes a service or goes out of business; it might have a profound impact on customers. Such conditions should be discussed in SLAs.
• Security - The malicious attacks by hackers are increasing and advancing day by day. Any possible security breach on the cloud service provider's end can put users' data at risk.

What are Some Examples of XaaS?

Anything as a service encompasses multiple products, tools, and technologies. Any cloud function can be provided as a service to the user under the XaaS model. Some of these services include Security, Authentication, Network, etc.

Let's discuss some of these services.

• Infrastructure as a Service - IaaS is a very popular cloud computing model which delivers computing resources such as virtualization, storage, network, and servers over the internet. It eliminates the need for on-premise infrastructure for organizations, therefore, cutting cost and maintenance overhead.
• Platform as a Service - PaaS abstracts another layer in the computing paradigm by including an operating system and runtime environment, apart from IaaS offerings, in the delivered service. It provides a platform for developers to build, run, deploy, and manage applications without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure or platform associated with the process.
• Software as a Service - SaaS is a cloud computing model that allows organizations to deliver applications to users. The user can only use the functionalities provided by the developer and have no visibility of underlying infrastructure, code, or build platform. Google Workspace, Slack, and Office 365 are very popular examples of Software as a Service.
• Authentication as a Service - AaaS allows organizations to apply multi-factor authentication, single sign-on, and password management to secure access to the application, from any device, anywhere. AaaS provides a high level of security and can protect an application from different attacks on authentication procedures such as man-in-the-middle, Denial of Service (DoS), and brute force.
• Containers as a Service - CaaS is a cloud service model that allows users to upload, run, organize, manage, scale, and stop containers by using container-based virtualization. A container is a package or software that includes all dependencies like code, runtime, libraries, and configurations, so it can run on any host system. Without CaaS, software development teams have to deploy and manage the underlying infrastructure on which the container runs.
• Database as a Service - DBaaS is a cloud computing service that provides access to a cloud database system without requiring the setup of physical hardware, software installation, or database configuration. The cloud provider is responsible for the upgrades, security, and backup of the database.
• Desktop as a Service - DaaS refers to a cloud computing service that delivers virtual desktops to end users over the internet. The service provider hosts the infrastructure, network, and storage in the cloud and provides a virtual desktop to the user to access data and applications. Generally, the service provider is responsible for maintenance, updates, cloud storage, security, and backup for these desktops.
• Disaster Recovery as a Service - DRaaS model allows organizations to back up their data and IT infrastructure like servers on a third-party cloud vendor. This is helpful to regain access and functionality to IT infrastructure after a disaster such as a power outage, hardware failure, file corruption, severe cyber attack, earthquake, hurricane, etc. In Disaster Recovery as a Service, terms are predefined by the organization and cloud vendor in a Service Level Agreement (SLA).
• Function as a Service - FaaS is a cloud computing service model that allows developers to build, run, and manage application packages as a function without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. FaaS follows an event-driven paradigm meaning a function is invoked by any action called an event. The resources are allocated only when the function is invoked by the event, therefore the organization only pays for the time the function is executing.
• Network as a Service - NaaS is a cloud service model which allows organizations to operate their network by utilizing network resources provided by service providers. NaaS vendors run networking functions using software, this allows organizations to set up their network without any on-premise hardware.
• Storage as a Service - STaaS is a service model that provides a platform for users to store data on public cloud storage. It is more cost-efficient than building an on-premise storage facility. It is highly used by organizations and individuals for storing multimedia, data backup and recovery, data repositories, and disaster recovery.
• Communication as a Service - CaaS is a cloud-service solution to provide communication services like Voice over IP (VoIP) for voice communication, Instant Messaging (IM) for text communication, and video conferencing for video communication. CaaS vendor is responsible for all hardware and software management and allows businesses to utilize communication devices on a pay-as-you-go and as-need basis. It eliminates the additional cost to the organization in buying, setting up, and maintaining hardware devices.

Future Scope of XaaS

XaaS provides services at low cost and scales according to the organization's needs. Moreover, the ability of XaaS to provide small cloud functions such as storage, network, disaster recovery, etc. as an individual service to the users has made it a preferred choice for developers.

Further, the advancement in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data, Automation, and the Internet of Things requires the cloud delivery models to be flexible and provide specified services. This factor has contributed to the growth of XaaS and the acceptance of the model by organizations. Service providers are continuously addressing the security and governance issues of XaaS, removing the hesitation of the organizations towards the XaaS model.

According to a report by Fortune Business Insights, the XaaS market is expected to grow from USD 545.35 billion in 2022 to USD 2378.07 billion in 2029.