Thriving in the new normal with everything-as-a-service

The current pandemic has accelerated the pace or adoption of digitalisation in our professional or personal lives. As more and more organisations are embracing digital-first strategy, they continue to see the benefits in terms of business agility, eliminating redundancy, and driving efficiency. Besides, they are increasingly investing in new technologies to churn out business intelligence, build new business models, and create business value.

This trend of digitisation, automation, and the connected world is a double-edged sword for enterprises of all sizes. On one side, it is opening a big market for the businesses to reach out to the customers spread across the world; on the other side; they are creating huge competition for themselves.

With this global landscape in front of organisations, in terms of opportunities as well as threats, it becomes imperative for them to be innovative and offer the best quality product and services to the market. The success or failure of businesses, however, largely depends upon their ability to scale up or scale down in the shortest possible time as well as provide the best of the customer experience.

Rise of 'As-a-Service' model

How do organisations manage this dilemma of scaling up or down and not making long-term CAPEX and OPEX commitment?The straightforward response to this is that enterprises should look at adopting 'As-a-Service' model. Besides digitisation, consuming everything on 'As-a-Service'model will ensure that they are scaling up or down faster and maintaining a profitable, cost-efficient business house. This model will also help them deliver new and innovative services and seamless customer experiences.

Cloud is one such phenomenon, where service providers are taking a risk on their customers behalf, invest millions of dollars to create the infrastructure, and convert that infrastructure into services. Enterprises need to put their applications on to the cloud and consume whatever suits them. In this model, being termed as 'Everything-as-a-Service' or XaaS, services rendered and delivered completely reside on the cloud with virtual access to almost everything.

'Everything-as-a-Service' encompasses Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which simplifies the deployment and integration of cloud services. With more and more services are being delivered on the cloud, providing virtual access to everything, and with digital technologies like AI/ML and IoT playing a critical role in building these services, 'Everything-as-a-Service' will gradually become a necessity for a truly digital-native enterprise.

The industry is witness to the adoption of SaaS technologies that replaced on-premises applications to an extent. However, big or small enterprises are still stuck with legacy technologies and are piling on more without thinking about how that will affect the fast-changing business models. Looking at how many micro-service applications are yet being developed in-house and enterprises' struggle to think beyond their legacy infrastructure, cloud vendors are approaching such organisations (having captive data centers) with a promise of delivering everything on 'As-a-Service' model.

A true differentiator for enterprises

Another trend being witnessed in the market, where the best of the OEMs, ISVs, SMEs, and SOHOs, are working in the advanced technology space and coming up with the best tech products and innovative services. The infrastructure providers partner with these companies while adopting their technology, integrating it with their infrastructure, and orchestrating and delivering all these to the customers' large segment on 'As-a-Service’ model. This kind of partnership is bound to help businesses focus on their core expertise and handle their IT needs cost-effectively, as all the services will be available to them at zero CAPEX investment and zero OPEX commitment.

According to research reports from IMARC, the global XaaS market is projected to reach $344.3 billion by 2024, expanding at a CAGR of 24 percent during 2019-2024. The increasing adoption of cloud-based monitoring, coupled with the growing need for scalable storage services, represents one of the key factors strengthening the growth of the global XaaS market.

The report further suggests that organisations worldwide are currently undergoing a digital transformation, which has resulted in the robust growth of corporate data. Cloud-based solutions offer affordable and efficient options for data storage, which is further contributing to the market growth. In line with this, the reducing cost of subscriptions with improved bandwidth and connectivity is also anticipated to bolster the market growth.

Enterprises are seeing XaaS as a game-changing business model, as it is helping them with a broader user base, creating and delivering more customer-focused solutions, exploring new markets, and cross-selling products and services

Hence, one cannot deny the fact that 'Everything-as-a-Service’ has the potential to transform the landscape across industries, making them more efficient and optimal in resources utilisation. With the tangible benefits of XaaS observed by industry experts, it is gradually being adapted to create new business models and scale existing models through innovation.

XaaS has become a primary driver in technology initiatives undertaken by enterprises. The rapid evolution and adoption of the cloud have led to the fast acceptance of the XaaS model.

The future belongs to XaaS

While the world has turned upside down over the past one year, the COVID imposed digitisation in our professional and personal lives helped everyone stay afloat. During this critical period, business organisations truly realised the value of the XaaS model among other digital technologies, as the adoption of it helped them sail through the disruptions and, at the same time, maintain business continuity.

When we look at the growing use cases of cloud, AI, ML, and IoT or citizen privacy concerns which will also make data to be locally stored in the domestic data centers– all these trends indicate that India will need a big dose of infrastructure in terms of data centers, cloud, and supporting services and everything must be made available on ‘As-a-Service’ model.

By Amit Agrawal, Head of Sales and Business Development, Yotta Infrastructure