Xaas in Cloud Computing
“Anything as a service” (XaaS) describes a general category of cloud computing and remote access services. It recognizes the vast number of products, tools, and technologies now delivered to users as a service over the Internet.
Essentially, any IT function can be a service for enterprise consumption. The service is paid for in a flexible consumption model rather than an advance purchase or license.
What are the benefits of XaaS?
XaaS has many benefits: improving spending models, speeding up new apps and business processes, and shifting IT resources to high-value projects.
- Expenditure model improvements. With XaaS, businesses can cut costs by purchasing services from providers on a subscription basis. Before XaaS and cloud services, businesses had to buy separate products-software, hardware, servers, security, infrastructure-install them on-site, and then link everything together to form a network. With XaaS, businesses buy what they need and pay on the go. The previous capital expenditure now becomes an operating expense.
- Speed up new apps and business processes. This model allows businesses to adopt new apps or solutions to changing market conditions. Using multi-tenant approaches, cloud services can provide much-needed flexibility. Resource pooling and rapid elasticity support mean that business leaders can add or subtract services. When users need innovative resources, a company can use new technologies, automatically scaling up the infrastructure.
- Transferring IT resources to high-value projects. Increasingly, IT organizations are turning to a XaaS delivery model to streamline operations and free up resources for innovation. They are also harnessing the benefits of XaaS to transform digitally and become more agile. XaaS gives more users access to cutting-edge technology, democratizing innovation. In a recent survey by Deloitte, 71% of companies report that XaaS now constitutes more than half of their company’s enterprise IT.
What are the disadvantages of XaaS?
There are potential drawbacks to XaaS: possible downtime, performance issues, and complexity.
- Possible downtime. The Internet sometimes breaks down, and when this happens, your XaaS provider can be a problem too. With XaaS, there can be issues of Internet reliability, flexibility, provisioning, and management of infrastructure resources. If XaaS servers go down, users will not be able to use them. XaaS providers can guarantee services through SLAs.
- Performance issues. As XaaS becomes more popular, bandwidth, latency, data storage, and recovery times can be affected. If too many clients use the same resources, the system may slow down. Apps running in virtualized environments can also be affected. Integration issues can occur in these complex environments, including the ongoing management and security of multiple cloud services.
- Complexity effect. Advancing technology for XaaS can relieve IT, workers from day-to-day operational headaches; however, it can be difficult to troubleshoot if something goes wrong.
- Internal IT staff still needs to stay updated on new technology. The cost of maintaining a high-performance, a robust network can add up – although the overall cost savings of the XaaS model are usually enormous. Nonetheless, some companies want to maintain visibility into their XaaS service provider’s environment and infrastructure. Furthermore, a XaaS provider that gets acquired shuts down a service or changes its roadmap can profoundly impact XaaS users.
What are some examples of XaaS?
Because XaaS stands for “anything as a service,” the list of examples is endless. Many kinds of IT resources or services are now delivered this way. Broadly speaking, there are three categories of cloud computing models: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Outside these categories, there are other examples such as disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), communications as a service (CaaS), network as a service (NaaS), database as a service (DBaaS), storage as a service (STaaS), desktop as a service (DaaS), and monitoring as a service (MaaS). Other emerging industry examples include marketing as a service and healthcare as a service.
NetApp and XaaS
NetApp provides several XaaS options, including IaaS, IT as a service (ITaaS), STaaS, and PaaS.
- When you differentiate your hosted and managed infrastructure services, you can increase service and platform revenue, improve customer satisfaction, and turn IaaS into a profit center. You can also take advantage of new opportunities to differentiate and expand services and platform revenue, including delivering more performance and predictability from your IaaS services. Plus, NetApp® technology can enable you to offer a competitive advantage to your customers and reduce time to market for deploying IaaS solutions.
- When your data center is in a private cloud, it takes advantage of cloud features to deliver ITaaS to internal business users. A private cloud offers characteristics similar to the public cloud but is designed for use by a single organization.
These characteristics include:
- Catalog-based, on-demand service delivery
- Automated scalability and service elasticity
- Multitenancy with shared resource pools
- Metering with utility-style operating expense models
- Software-defined, centrally managed infrastructure
- Self-service lifecycle management of services
STaaS. NetApp facilitates private storage as a service in a pay-as-you-go model by partnering with various vendors, including Arrow Electronics, HPE ASE, BriteSky, DARZ, DataLink, Faction, Forsythe, Node4, Proact, Solvinity, Synoptek, and 1901 Group. NetApp also seamlessly integrates with all major cloud service providers including AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
PaaS. NetApp PaaS solutions help simplify a customer’s application development cycle. Our storage technologies support PaaS platforms to:
- Reduce application development complexity.
- Provide high-availability infrastructure.
- Support native multitenancy.
- Deliver webscale storage.
PaaS services built on NetApp technology enable your enterprise to adopt hybrid hosting services-and accelerate your application-deployment time.
The future market for XaaS
The combination of cloud computing and ubiquitous, high-bandwidth, global internet access provides a fertile environment for XaaS growth.
Some organizations have been tentative to adopt XaaS because of security, compliance and business governance concerns. However, service providers increasingly address these concerns, allowing organizations to bring additional workloads into the cloud.