XaaS is an umbrella term that refers to service offerings that are accessed as needed and financed using a pay-as-you-go cloud computing pricing model. XaaS offerings can scale up or down as needed with IT services delivered on demand by a managed service provider. 

Signs from vendors and researchers point to XaaS going mainstream as a business model as customers bring more workloads into the cloud. Some organizations hesitate to adopt XaaS because of security, compliance and governance concerns. However, service providers are increasingly addressing these issues.

The XaaS market is projected to grow to $2.4 trillion in 2029 from $437 billion in 2021. 

What is the difference between XaaS and SaaS? 

SaaS and XaaS both refer to the delivery of a cloud service, but XaaS is the more general term. SaaS is a cloud-based software distribution model in which a cloud provider hosts applications and provides them to users over the internet as a service.

There are many different types of XaaS deployment models. The three main ones are SaaS, platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). More in detail: 

1- SaaS includes a range of applications, such as Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce.
PaaS providers deliver hardware and software tools to users over the internet. 

2 - PaaS offerings, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk, Apache Stratos, Google App Engine and Salesforce's Heroku and Salesforce Platform, typically provide preconfigured virtual machines and other resources for application development and testing.

3 - IaaS is a model where a cloud provider provides IT infrastructure, such as storage, server and networking resources, over the internet to customers on a subscription basis . Examples of IaaS offerings include AWS Elastic Compute Cloud, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure.

Watch the youtube video: 

Pros and Cons of XaaS
 

Some of the main benefits of XaaS are the following:

• Cost-effective.
• Less physical overhead, such as space, power and cooling. 
• Technical support. 
• Scalability. 

Challenges of XaaS include the following:

• Resilience and internet reliability. Customers depend on the XaaS provider's infrastructure; disruptions in service are a potential issue.
• Visibility. Customers have limited visibility into and control over the service provider's environment and infrastructure.
• Vendor lock-in and dependence. 
• Security. If a provider experiences a security breach, the user's data is put at risk.
• Hidden fees.