Anything-as-a-service is a specific type of computing that involves IT resources and services that can be accessed without owning the associated physical equipment. For example, a Taxi; it served as a car and you just have to pay whenever you want to take a taxi. The best part is you don’t need to buy a taxi, fuel it up, and don’t even need to drive, all you need to do is book the taxi and you’ll be at the location easily. This also follows in IT-services where a customer doesn’t need to buy services and needs to pay tenant amount only.
Usage of Anything-as- a-service can be done in 3 phases. In the first phase, businesses are virtualizing their standalone data centers using VMware to improve server utilization. During the second phase, companies will begin using services to bridge in on-premise private cloud and a public service provider supported cloud. Applications from these clouds will communicate to form a solution; which is hybrid cloud computing. In the third phase, multiple private clouds and public clouds spread across multiple service providers will communicate to provide solutions. And, this is known as intercloud.
Interesting? So, let’s discuss how service providers can implement this model?
- Step 1: Start building out the infrastructure that will support the anything-as-a-service-model.
- Step 2: Start offering compute capacity to run customers’ applications on the cloud, failure recovery to ensure business continuity, development platforms to allow new offerings to be tested and develop in the cloud, and virtual desktop reducing operating cost to provide overflow capacity during peak demand
- Step 3: Eventually move on offering platform-based service and there you have the 3 steps that will lead to a gradual and successful anything-as-a-service model.
Models of Cloud Computing
Anything-as-a-service can be delivered at the appropriate scale in a multi-tenant environment on-premise, on-demand, or for both by the following 3 different categories:
- Software-as-a-service: It lets businesses access applications running on the service provider’s infrastructure through a thin client interface.
- Platform-as-a-service: It lets businesses deploy their custom applications into a service provider’s infrastructure.
- Infrastructure-as-a-service: It lets businesses rent processing storage networks and other fundamental computing resources to deploy and run any software operating systems and applications. No matter which is chosen, a business won’t have to manage or control the infrastructure but it can control some key configuration elements.
Other kinds of anything-as-a-service model include storage-as-a-Service (SaaS), Database-as-a-service (DBaaS), Desktop-as-a-service (DaaS), monitoring-as-a-service (MaaS) communications-as-a-service (CaaS), and malware-as-a-service (MaaS).
Conclusion
Anything-as-a-service has numerous advantages like it can switch the capital expenses to operating expenses, enable businesses to launch new apps and software easily, and more projects can be done at one time. Therefore, more and more businesses are shifting to anything-as-a-service. What this means for a service provider is that if you offer a solution that doesn’t have anything-as-a-service model, it’s better to start moving towards that.
