The Age of Everything as a Service
January 20th, 2021 by admin
A new concept is sweeping IT managed services, and it makes perfect sense. Everything as a service (XaaS) is the concept of calling up software components across a network. It is a subset of cloud computing, and it is the essence of a variety of solutions we deploy for clients every day. The "As-a-Service" model of cloud computing, providing services over the Internet, is a trend that continues to gain traction across the globe. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings are becoming the go-to method for users to access services and products like Office 365 and Desktop-as-a-Service solutions like Azure, AWS, dinCloud, and others. Other kinds of offerings are being made available in the same pay-as-you-go business model, such as our Security as a Service offering. By now, you have seen the terms SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), and IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) plenty of times. Now, a newer concept encompasses these ideas—and more: everything as a service or XaaS.
The primary goal of XaaS offerings is to increase the value for the customer. In a XaaS model, businesses subscribe to receive ongoing benefits from the product(s), and it encompasses technical support and back-end maintenance to make it as hands-free for the business owner as possible. And whether that is a suite of cybersecurity solutions or desktop support, in a XaaS offering, customers get scalability and comprehensive IT support at a much lower cost than they could achieve by going it alone. We can offer organizations greater value by combining services and products and managing them for the business than the products or services would provide as standalone offerings. The bottom line is, XaaS offers the flexibility for users (employees) and companies to customize their computing environments to craft the experiences they desire, all on-demand. And the best part is, for remote workforces, XaaS just needs a strong cloud services platform and reliable Internet connectivity to deploy successfully.
The core idea behind XaaS and other cloud services is that businesses can cut costs and get specific kinds of personal resources by purchasing services from managed services providers on a subscription basis. Before the emergence of XaaS and cloud services, businesses often had to buy the licensed software products and install and maintain them on site. They had to buy hardware and link it together to create expanded networks. They had to do all security work on site, which often required high-salary IT staff overhead. And, they had to provide expensive server setups and other infrastructure for all their business processes.
By contrast, with XaaS, businesses simply buy what they need, and pay for it as they need it. This need-based model allows businesses to drastically reduce overhead and improve efficiency and flexibility of their operations. Using multi-tenant approaches, cloud services can provide a lot of flexibility. Concepts like resource pooling and rapid elasticity support allow business leaders to add or subtract services as necessary. XaaS services are typically governed by something called a service level agreement (SLA), where client and managed services provider work closely together to understand how services will be provided based on the number of users.
Ready to jump on the XaaS bandwagon? Request a quote today and discover how affordable a managed IT infrastructure can be for your business.
Posted in: Solutions