EVERYTHING AS A SERVICE (XAAS): THE TURNING POINT FOR CLOUD COMPUTING
The market of Cloud as-a-service solutions is constantly growing. That is told by Gartner studies and by the Osservatorio Cloud e ICT as a Service of the School of Management of Milan’s Politecnico, that register an amount of 260,2 billion of dollars. They estimate a further increase of these services for the following years and introduce the topic of Everything as a Service as the new era of Cloud solutions. What is that exactly? Let’s see it together in the next paragraphs.
Cloud as-a-service solutions
As we just mentioned, the Cloud Computing scenario offers a range of solutions called as-a-service. Among them, we can identify the main Cloud as-a-service solutions which are very advantageous for companies:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): the Cloud provider supplies an infrastructure with all the necessary resources, which may be freely accessed and managed by the customer
- Platform as a Service (PaaS): is on a higher level of abstraction; the provider offers to the company an “all-inclusive” platform where the client can develop its applications easily and rapidly, without worry about the technical implications related to the underlying infrastructure
- Software as a Service (SaaS): the first solution came in 1999 by Salesforce.com. SaaS is a software distribution model in which the provider hosts applications and make them available to customers through the internet. It represents the highest level of abstraction of Cloud Computing
Everything as a Service (XaaS): what is it?
The evolution of Cloud as-a-service solutions is Everything as a Service, also called XaaS. A recent study of Market Research gives to XaaS a market growth rate of 40% within 2020. XaaS concept shows a change in the IT paradigm, a new era in the Cloud in which each tool, function or system shall be provided as a service. Not just the “classic” solutions like IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, but also storage, Disaster Recovery, cyber-security solutions, anything that a business may need at the Information Technology level, must be supply as a service. In short words, with XaaS you pass from selling products to selling their value as services. At a consumer level it is a well-established business model, but in the IT scenario it represents a crucial turning point able to really innovate firms and increase their productivity and efficiency. Indeed, the basis of an as-a-service model is a win-win relationship between provider and customer: companies do not have to bear significant investments at once and providers has the security of long-term contracts.
In parole povere, con XaaS si passa dalla vendita di prodotti alla vendita del loro valore come servizio. A livello consumer è un modello di business ormai consolidato, ma nello scenario IT rappresenta una vera e propria svolta in grado di innovare realmente le aziende e di incrementarne efficienza e produttività. Alla base di un ecosistema a servizi, infatti, c’è una relazione tra fornitore e cliente basata sulla logica win-win per cui le aziende non devono sostenere investimenti significativi in una volta sola e i provider hanno la sicurezza di un contratto a lungo termine.
Features of XaaS
XaaS can be considerd the ultimate Cloud Computing model. Companies that need new IT services or need to scale existent solutions can easily choose the ideal solution for their needs and check its availability according to their specific budget. This new type of Cloud must have three basic features, which are essential and must be integrated with one another:
– Availability of the offer for users
– Declared levels of service
– Monitoring, measuring and debit systems
Nowadays, an increasing number of firms is going towards Multi-Cloud and Hybrid solutions, which provide useful platform to use easily services in XaaS perspective.
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