A Brief History of X as a Service (XaaS)

Before getting into each of the acronyms, it’s important to have a grasp of what the “as a service” model is and where it comes from. It basically means any technology that historically has been delivered on a customer site that is now delivered through the Internet. That sounds great, but why you should you really care? Well, to start, the everything-as-a-service (XaaS) model with the cloud is taking over hundreds of billions of dollars of work. As Douglas explains in the video, this isn’t a transition that’s happened over night. He traces back from the ’80s where mainframes and heavy software were the standard, through the dawn of the internet in the ’90s, and into the new millennium. So, what do these XaaS models actually do?

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

IaaS is all about putting compute power into the cloud. One of its largest benefits is that it’s all OPEX, meaning it’s infinitely scalable and flexible for your work. This gives you faster time to market and allows your IT department to focus on business needs.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

This is a development team’s dream. It vastly reduces development time and overall costs. PaaS leverages mobility as well; a crucial concept for a modern MSP in this constantly on-the-go era.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS makes it to so Fortune 500 functionality is available for all businesses. Much like how PaaS was a developer’s dream, PaaS is an answer to the pleas of your mobile workforce. The scalability and OPEX reduces time to the benefit of your applications.

Business Process as a Service (BPaaS)

This is a great way to leverage all your best-in-class technologies together. It frees up your IT staff from spending their time managing underlying XaaS. Of course, as you might guess, it’s OPEX. It gives you faster time to market and scalable business operations.

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)

UCaaS offers you many productivity services in one. It’s infinitely scalable and extremely remote-office friendly. The per seat pricing makes it flexible for your individual business needs as well.

Desktop as a Service (DaaS)

DaaS comes with disaster recovery is built in. It lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) and is customizable to your needs. For the mobile workforce, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Obviously these are high level observations, but it should give you a more general idea of what we’re talking about when we dive into the world of XaaS. Now it’s time to gear up and find the right XaaS for you.

Thanks to Todd Hussey at CSBExcellence for sharing!

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