What is Anything as a Service (XaaS)?
Anything as a Service (XaaS) refers to a large assortment of services that are related to cloud computing and delivered over internet for remote accessibility. It is possible for vendors to offer wide range of services over the internet or any other similar networks. The origin of the concept of Anything as a Service can be attributed to Software as a Service that involves cloud service providers delivering variety of software applications over Web. This followed large categories of services such as infrastructure, platforms, and communications that could be delivered by leveraging internet. These were termed as IaaS, PaaS, CaaS, and so forth. The sheer number of service categories has resulted in terming the entire collection as Anything as a Service or Everything as a Service (XaaS) with a mild tone of sarcasm.
The basic concept that has resulted in proliferation of these services that are collectively referred to as Anything as a Service (XaaS) and many more cloud assisted services is to reduce costs and avail exclusive resources as subscription based services, These services are offered on demand and through Web for accessibility at anytime and from anywhere. Prior to emergence of XaaS model of services, businesses had to purchase licensed copies of software that had to be installed locally on their machines. These had to be supported with specialized hardware for building extended networks. This also included setting up of expensive infrastructure such as servers in addition to performing regular security updates and much more.
XaaS facilitates businesses to avail any kind of service for supporting their business processes as and when required without need to purchase and install software locally. Cloud assisted services changed the whole scenario of delivering these services dramatically. These services are extremely flexible and can prove to be highly cost effective due to resource pooling and multi tenancy arrangements. All services related to XaaS can be rapidly added or decommissioned in response to needs and are governed by Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
