The transition toward the “as-a-service” model has been underway for years, but it’s accelerated in the last couple of years.
Disruptions due to the Pandemic and the complexity of rapidly enabling a remote workforce have created the need for flexible IT solutions. To keep up in today’s rapidly changing environment, organizations need solutions that enable them to create new business processes, products, and services. As a result, adoption of the everything-as-a-service (XaaS) model has been increasing.
Before XaaS, businesses were often constrained by legacy IT systems and traditional business processes. Now 80% of early XaaS adopters say that they has accelerated their shift from traditional IT to XaaS over the past few years. This has enabled them to find alternative solutions to survive in uncharted waters and an ever changing environment.
So what is XaaS? In this article, we’ll look at what the XaaS model is, why it’s on the rise, its benefits, and some traditional and emerging ways that businesses can benefit from implementing XaaS.
What Is the Everything-as-a-Service Model?
Organizations have always needed newer, better, faster hardware and software to stay relevant and to meet employee and customer needs. In the past, this typically meant having to make major CAPEX investments every few years to update software and purchase new IT infrastructure.
Everything as a service (also known as “anything as a service”) is a general category of cloud-based solutions that are deployed remotely and can be accessed on demand. XaaS can be delivered in several ways, including:
- Private on-premises offerings (i.e., managed in your own data center)
- Hosted by a service provider
- In the public cloud
- A combination of on-premises and public cloud offerings (hybrid cloud)
XaaS offerings have been expanding and now deliver a wide variety of products, tools, and technologies. Almost any IT functionality can be offered as a service. Former CAPEX costs transition to more flexible OPEX investments.
With XaaS, businesses can significantly reduce operational costs, access new and advanced technologies more quickly, and gain greater control over their IT infrastructure.
Benefits of the XaaS Model
XaaS offers several benefits for organizations that want to deliver new and innovative solutions faster:
- Reduced, Predictable Expenses. XaaS allows businesses to turn capital expenses into predictable monthly operating expenses, lowering the cost of ownership. In most cases, the service provider buys and maintains the infrastructure. As a result, XaaS helps reduce overhead, staffing, and maintenance costs. Businesses no longer need to spend more on computing power and storage in anticipation of future needs because they can provision and pay for these components as needed.
- Greater Agility. The XaaS model gives businesses greater agility to develop innovative solutions that meet changing market conditions or take advantage of new opportunities. Companies can quickly customize technology environments to respond to customer or employee needs.
- More Efficient Use of the IT Team’s Time. Because XaaS is partially or fully managed by the service provider, it takes some of the pressure off of in-house IT resources. With admin tasks moved to the service provider, organizations can streamline operations to focus IT resources on higher-value projects.
- Better Backup and Disaster Recovery Planning. A comprehensive data backup and recovery plan is critical with cybersecurity threats and ransomware attacks on the rise. XaaS solutions can play an integral part in ensuring that your business can continue operations during a disaster.
- Use of Data. With access to unlimited storage capacity, businesses can store data for long periods of time. This gives them the ability to analyze historical and current data trends to make better business decisions, enhance customer experience, and capitalize on emerging trends to gain a competitive advantage.
XaaS and Innovation
The move to XaaS may have accelerated recently, but most businesses were already looking to reduce costs, eliminate redundancies, and improve agility and efficiency.
The digitization trend is opening larger market opportunities for businesses to reach customers. But, it’s also creating greater competition. Organizations must continue to innovate and take advantage of these opportunities. Their ability to innovate rests in part on their ability to scale IT resources up or down without making long-term commitments to capital expenditures.
XaaS can help facilitate this innovation. It’s likely to become a necessity rather than not a nice to have as more services are delivered via the cloud and digital technologies like AI, ML, and IoT are more integrated. XaaS offerings can help CIOs and IT leaders prioritize productivity gains and new growth opportunities while also creating greater cohesion between IT and business units.
Article Source:Pure Storage
