Guenther 1

Nathan Guenther
Daniel Powell
ENC 3241
March 9, 2015
XaaS (anything as a service) in the I.T. World
Abstract
How do the trends of moving to the Cloud, cloud computing, and X as a service, apply
to businesses information technology infrastructure? Traditionally the bottleneck within
computer systems has been the network components, specifically a lack of bandwidth for web
based connections. Until recently, everything a business needed was operated in house by the I.T.
department with proprietary hardware and software. Together this gave businesses their own
intranet and domain that was excluded from the outside world, while offering security, and
customizability. With the web becoming an extremely powerful platform with unlimited potential
for growth, it can be a favorable alternative that can cut costs and complexities. This lets
organizations focus on what they do best: their product or service.

Terminology
There are numerous different methodologies and terms that all essentially talk about the
same thing. The whole idea is leveraging the internet, and all is resources to deliver whatever is
needed. This is where the X as a service, aka anything or everything as a service (aaS) comes
into the picture. To the consumer or average user, the term Cloud has taken off as a simple way
to represent the new way of computing. Its almost magical in peoples eyes as they dont realize
where its all happening, but they just see the end result of data displayed all pretty on their

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smartphone or computer. Cloud computing is a more technical term that is the backbone of the
thin client model. Technology has not slowed down, in fact its growing exponentially.
However the growth of the hardware we use has drastically slowed, yet our services have
continued to expand. This is because weve taken the stress off of the individual device, and put
that in the cloud, hence the term cloud computing. What this means is your device just is relayed
information, and has a way of displaying whatever is requested, while the servers in datacenters
do all the heavy lifting, computing, and calculations. Especially with the mobile revolution, this
saves costs on the devices hardware and battery usage. This huge shift in computing
methodology, is what allowed smartphones to get cheap and widespread so quickly.

Solutions
With this whole new concept, it has sparked a completely new industry for startups and
services to offer to businesses of any size. On the simplest level, Software as a Service (SaaS)
allows your product or application to run completely on the Web. The benefits of this include
simpler administration with a consistent experience for each user or customer. Every time they
open the service, it will always be the most up to date version. This also means all of your users
will be using the same version thus cutting out the hassles of supporting legacy versions. For
developers this is huge, and drastically eases the collaboration process. On top of everything, it
means your service can be accessible globally with just an internet connection off a variety of
devices, without having to maintain support for specific hardware. On the developer side, for a
business working to design and support a product, using a Platform as a Service (PaaS) can be
extremely beneficial. This model provides an environment with the necessary hardware and
software tools (usually for application development) to its users over the internet as a service.

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This cuts out the pain of purchasing lots of powerful computers and software licenses for your on
premise team. These must be upgraded and maintained as well, which requires more employees
and time all of which put more work onto the IT team. When using a PaaS, everyone can work
remotely (essentially just compute remotely) and log in to the platform through a web interface,
and then do everything else like normal. Finally the last of the main three categories is
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This type of cloud computing provides computing resources in
a virtualized manner over the internet. This is the most complete solution as it can almost
encompass a businesss complete IT infrastructure. This model gives up the most control out of
the three, by removing most of the local components, however it provides the most flexible cloud
solution especially when utilized with various SaaS and PaaS solutions. The IaaS provider can
host hardware, software, storage, services and more all integrated together in the cloud. The
biggest benefit is the automation possibilities, and the easy scalability of your product as your
business grows. The best and worst part of IaaS is the common pay per use system. Depending
on the provider and specifics to your configuration, you pay for compute power by the hour, and/
or storage usage. The good news is the industry is still extremely new, and pricing is very
competitive and being driven down frequently which benefits the customer.

Consequences
It is easy to see why over the past not even 2 years, this industry has absolutely exploded.
For the average non-tech business to setup an I.T. system for their employees, it used to require
proprietary specialists at absurd hourly rates to set things up, and thats without the day to day
management, growth planning, and security. However, many businesses are not comfortable
giving up this much control, and potentially their users confidential data. The other big factor is

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price, because many times it is cheaper if you do it all yourself. Especially if you have a large
complex infrastructure, and lots of traffic or active users on your service, the prices rack up
quick. It really comes down to convenience and simplicity, while it may be cheaper to do things
in-house, can you hire the right people to make it happen and have a reliable system for your
customers and employees? Many businesses now say no, and would rather pay companies like
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to handle all their systems for them on their already proven
infrastructures. Fast, Secure, and Scalable is what everyone wants, and the big names in the
industry have mastered it.

Recommendations & Conclusion

If you run a business or startup and are looking at simplifying things, or deciding how
you want to structure for the future, it is simply unrealistic to not consider potential X as a
Service solutions. Once you determine what you need, look at the various providers, their prices,
and what they offer to see if could work for your business. If youre deciding on an App or
service to offer to your customers and how to structure it, the SaaS model is becoming the only
choice as consumers demand it. Whatever phone, tablet, or laptop a user has, they want to access
your app instantly, have it work, and stay synced across all of them. Ultimately it is becoming
harder and harder to deny the viability of these massive powerhouse players when it comes to
compute power and infrastructure. While the little guys can still do it on their own, I dont see
this being a standard for much longer. The future is in the cloud as everything gets further
interconnected. Data powers everything, and the quicker and faster your data can move around
the world, the better you can reach your customers.

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