By Himanshu Varshney
XaaS is emerging as an important part of many enterprises’ strategic playbooks. One of the key factors contributing to this acceleration is its ability to make new tools and technologies accessible to diverse users across multiple verticals. Industry experts predict that the global XaaS market will grow at a CAGR of 38% by the year 2020.
One of the main drivers of XaaS is the industry’s shift towards the OPEX model to manage IT infrastructure and reduce costs. The pay as you use model helps enterprises save a lot of money, which is otherwise spent on building in-house facilities and managing them. The increased flexibility and freedom of choice also make XaaS more appealing to businesses.
Companies are now considering storage, server and network virtualization as part of their strategy for consolidating networks and to increase cost savings. The XaaS approach helps the internal team by managing all the risks that are related to security, backup or any technology updates. The vendor takes full responsibility for maintaining and updating the infrastructure under an exclusive monthly package.
Here are some of the emerging trends in XaaS:
1) Content-as-a-Service
The Content-as-a-Service is clearly one of the fastest growing XaaS segments, it is expected to grow at the rate of 40 percent by the year 2020. This is definitely not surprising, because of the growth rate of data across industry verticals in the past several years. The XaaS market is evolving to offer CaaS to help companies organize data repositories and optimize application agility. It also enables businesses to build a scalable storage infrastructure, which can map resources across various domains.
The system offers high-capacity cloud storage at the central hub and cached storage at the premise. This reduces the burden on the local storage arrays. With the help of dynamic resource allocation capability, the storage arrays split the workload among different layers, which as a result optimizes the storage and performance while bringing down the latency even during peak loads.
2) Data Lake-as-a-Service
Streamlining various file sources to Hadoop has been one of the major concerns linked with data ingestion technologies. Companies of the present era need a scalable approach wherein they can easily onboard a huge chunk of data from thousands of disparate databases on to Hadoop.
With DLaaS (Data Lake-as-a-Service), companies can capitalize on the automated data ingestion approach, which delivers both flexibility as well as scalability that is required in today’s evolving data landscape. The automation also brings complex analytical capabilities as and when new data is ingested.
3) Data Protection-as-a-Service
Data Protection-as-a-Service is an innovative service that empowers companies to transform their legacy data to create a secure, application-aware data repository, which can address data management challenges that is present in the complex network storage environment.
With DPaaS, businesses are provided with a highly affordable way of bringing storage, backup, and also disaster recovery options into their business, and at the same time maintaining the cost efficiency, which would have not been possible before DPaaS. By offering the services that businesses are in need of, DPaaS is helping companies effectively plan their future by providing them with the necessary tools they need to succeed.
4) AI as a service (AIaaS)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a service enables companies to try out AI for various purposes without huge initial investments. Different AI provider platforms provide a wide range of Machine Learning and AI services. These variations can be suited to a company’s AI needs, as companies need to evaluate pricing and features to check what works for them. Cloud AI service providers can provide specialized hardware that is needed for AI-related tasks, like the GPU based processing for intensive workloads.
5) IoT-as-a-Service
Companies have realized the importance of data analytics and the impact it can have in their business. Lately, data is growing at an insane rate and its growth can be attributed to IoT. The data that is generated across a big network of sensors brings a new set of management challenges to enterprise storage. The IoT-as-a-Service is gaining in this context as it effectively tackles the data management challenges that are associated with advanced networks, which helps in improving the operational efficiency as well as the customer experience.
Conclusion
The growing popularity of technologies like analytics and IoT has built a competitive landscape where only companies taking a big leap can win the race. It is important for enterprises to consider modern approaches that deliver automated or self-service capabilities that enable applications to operate with minimal human intervention. By bringing together some important functionalities such as analytics, security and storage, XaaS helps enterprises become agile and respond effectively to challenges in the VUCA environment.
(The author is the CEO & Co-Founder, HashedIn)
