It’s beginning to feel a lot like XMaaS - The rise of “as a Service”

16 Dec 2022, by Slade Baylis

We’ve touched on this in other articles, but one of the rapidly growing trends in the industry is the rise of more and more products being provided “as a Service”. In short, this is the move away from technical solutions being sold as pre-packaged products that are handed across to clients, to a model where software and technical solutions are instead provided as an ongoing service.

As a holistic IT provider, we’re a big fan of this - there are a large range of advantages to moving to a service model. One major advantage is that it incentivises your providers to make sure the solutions they’re offering continue to solve the problems you need them to solve – as opposed to a one-time purchase model, where they look to sell you on their solution initially, but then have no financial incentive to ensure that their product continue to improve. However, don’t worry, even though we’re fans of the model, we’re not going to try to convince you to buy steaming service subscriptions for your kids rather than getting them actual presents – though they’d probably love a Disney+ binge!

This trend is part of a larger trend of businesses moving more of their IT functions to the cloud - whether it’s through moving their hardware to be colocated at a datacentre, or something more advanced such as migrating over to virtual platforms within a Public Cloud. The benefit of this is that they’re able to shift the responsibility of either the infrastructure or physical hardware onto their upstream provider, instead of taking that responsibility on themselves. However, these new “as a Service” solutions take this principle to another level - allowing user to opt to shift even more responsibility over to their providers.

With more of these “as a Service” solutions being developed all the time, a new term was needed to encapsulate them all – that new term is XaaS or “Everything as a Service”.

What is XaaS? – The beginnings of SaaS and the emergence of more ‘as a Service’ solutions

XaaS, or “Everything as a Service”, is the name for a group of services wherein users utilise cloud computing to solve problems. There are several different characteristics that are common across most of these types of services which include: using cloud-hosted software; allowing for remote access of systems; outsourcing responsibilities to improve results and lower costs; and the move to operating expenditure rather than capital expenditure.

It’s via these commonalities that organisations are able to move to have greater strategic agility - being able to scale their IT services to meet their needs in the moment, access those services from anywhere without being tied to predetermined locations, as well as take advantage of external experts in different areas of IT to get the best results possible.

The world of XaaS really started with the emergence of SaaS, or “Software as a Service" - whilst there are some examples of services that could be described as SaaS earlier, one of the earliest examples of a SaaS provider was the launch of the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform called “Salesforce” back in 1999. Previous to this, software solutions to were provided to businesses so that they could install and run them on their own hardware. However, the founders of Salesforce had a different idea in mind – they believed that software should be available anywhere and anytime - through utilising global cloud computing infrastructure.

In this model, instead of organisations purchasing pre-packaged software and then installing and hosting it on hardware they own, the developers of the Salesforce software themselves would host the application on their own cloud infrastructure and provide access to it via the internet.

At the time, the idea was a radical one, as it was assumed that this cloud infrastructure wouldn’t be able to handle the volume of clients that were currently served via more traditional methods.  The concern behind this was if thousands of clients were currently using their own servers and the horsepower that came with them, being used to handle very resource intensive operations, then how could it be possible to provide this through a more centralised cloud model? As time has shown, they achieved it – they were able to provide an online cloud-computing-powered CRM and within the first year they expanded from their four initial founders to over 40 employees and an office at the “Rincon Center” in San Francisco that was 8,000-square-foot!

At its core, the principles that SaaS were built on were the use of multitenant architecture, providing greater access to users, and providing individual customisation allowing each user to easily customise their services to meet their own needs. And it’s these same principles that sit behind most of the other XaaS solutions that have been created since.  

SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS - The three main models of Cloud services

One of the easiest ways of understanding the differences between these new service models and the more traditional approaches is to understand how they affect responsibility for three aspects of IT, these being Infrastructure, Platform, and Software.

With previous approaches it is quite simple and intuitive to understand who is responsible for each of these aspects. When you purchase software, install it onto your own hardware, and then store that hardware at your own premises, you are responsible for providing the infrastructure such as the power, cooling and security.  You are also responsible for providing and maintaining the hardware, as well as for updating and securing the software. However, with these new approaches, the responsibility for some of these aspects shifted to the XaaS provider.

Within the world of XaaS models, three of them stand out as being the primary sub-categories which most others fall into – these three are IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service). Each of these can be thought as forming a stack of services, with SaaS at the pinnacle, PaaS supporting, and both being supported by the underlying IaaS.

With SaaS platforms, all three of these become the responsibility of the SaaS provider. For PaaS platforms, the platform and infrastructure become their responsibility, however the software that you use on that platform remains the responsibility of the end-user. Finally, as you’ve probably guessed, with IaaS platforms the underlying infrastructure is the provider’s responsibility, with the end-user able to control and have responsibility for their own platform and software.

It might seem common-sense to have the provider be responsible for all three of these aspects, however these three different models serve different functions which can be useful for different types of audiences.

SaaS platforms are great for those who are able to use that pre-built software as a solution to meet their business needs – examples of this are financial systems such as Xero and Sage, or CRM platforms like Salesforce or Monday. However, these pre-built services might not meet unique requirements that each business has or give you the control that they require, which is where PaaS platforms come into play.

For those who are creating or hosting custom applications, PaaS allows you to focus on building and/or hosting that software, without needing to worry about the behind-the-scenes platforms and infrastructure required to make it work. This is ideal for web developers who need to prioritise solving problems for their clients, as it allows them to leave the administration of systems and platforms to the system administrators who are experts in it. 

With regards to IaaS, these services are for organisations or system administrators that need to build custom IT environments, without wanting to get their hands dirty where the rubber meets the road. IaaS give users full control over the configuration of their own platforms to allow them to meet their own technical or regulatory requirements - all without having to worry about power, cooling, physical security, and other “more on the ground” aspects required to run them.

A visual guide to Shared Responsibility – Where are the lines drawn?

To help make the delegation of responsibilities for each platform clearer, here is a visual guide on where the lines are generally drawn between the responsibilities of the user and the provider.

We’ve also touched on this separation of responsibilities in our Cloud-to-Cloud Backups – Why backups of your data are just as important as ever! article recently, highlighting the common lack of understanding around where the lines are drawn on user data specifically. It’s surprising, but as little as 13% of businesses were found to understand that their data was entirely their responsibility to protect!

A glossary of terms – What are the most common types of XaaS?

Here is a list of the more common XaaS terms that you may come across, with an explanation as to what each of them refers to. It covers the three primary types we’ve already mentioned, but also includes others which have come to prominence in recent years.

This is not all encompassing – as there are more XaaS solutions coming out continually (such as FaaS, or Firewalls as a Service that are on the horizon) – however this will give a good understanding of the more prevalent services that exist today. 

Have any questions about one of the types of XaaS?

There are many other forms of XaaS as well, but there is only so much we can cover in a single article! 

If you have any questions about any of the XaaS types we’ve covered here, or want to know more about one we didn’t, reach out to us! You can call us on 1300 769 972 (Option #1) or email us at sales@micron21.com to find out more.

And finally, we hope that you have a very merry XMaaS!