11 July 2016

Cloud directions: Everything turns into cloud services

Everything-as-a-service (XaaS) offerings allow excellent scalability, economy, and flexibility

Today’s technology mind sets and cloud capabilities are coming together to design and deliver business benefits through services that users can access anywhere, anytime. Combine the growing use of microservices and microservice architectures with the increasing awareness of discrete workloads and their optimal accommodation in the cloud or locally. Soon, you get to a point where almost anything that software and computing systems can do, can be delivered as a scalable, robust, economical service: everything-as-a-service (Xaas).

Software, infrastructure, and platform as a service are well known. There are also desktop-as-a-service (DaaS), communications-as-a-service (CaaS), backend-as-a-service (BaaS), monitoring-as-a-service (MaaS), analytics-as-a-service (AaaS), noted as a best practice by Capgemini, and others. Some of the concepts behind these services have been around for many years—CaaS, for instance, is at least a decade old—but have become fully practical and scalable only recently, with the emergence of containerization and microservices.

Services in the hybrid cloud

Not all of these cloud services will have the same kind of name and acronym. Some of the leading providers of cloud services are already offering large portfolios of service offerings, ready for businesses to implement them quickly and begin working with them. Dozens of service products are available under the umbrella of Microsoft Azure, and the Cortana Intelligence Suite provides additional, big data analytics capabilities. Both Azure and the Cortana Intelligence Suite include solutions and features that can flexibly span cloud and on-premise resources. Amazon Web Services also offers a wide array of analytics, development, IoT, management, mobile, security, and other products and services.

When businesses want to take advantage of cloud services, not only will they need to determine which workloads make most sense for which kind of deployment model—cloud, on-premise, or hybrid—but they also have to make a choice from today’s best service providers. They may find that each cloud company has unique strengths that strongly recommend their products in certain capability areas, and they will need to pick the best option for the outcomes they want to achieve.

In a larger context, cloud-based microservices facilitate the services and values that businesses generate with big data, the IoT, social channels, and mobility. The value and effectiveness of these technologies and the applications and data connected to them could really not exist without the cloud. In that sense, the cloud is also a key building block for the digital transformation strategies that more and more businesses implement.