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XaaS (anything as a service)

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XaaS (anything as a service)

What is XaaS (anything as a service)?

XaaS is a collective term said to stand for a number of things including "X as a service," "anything as a service" or "everything as a service." The acronym refers to an increasing number of services that are delivered over the Internet rather than provided locally or on-site. XaaS is the essence of cloud computing.

The most common examples of XaaS are Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). The combined use of these three is sometimes referred to as the SPI model (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS). Other examples of XaaS include storage as a service (SaaS), communications as a service (CaaS), network as a service (NaaS) and monitoring as a service (MaaS).

Following the convention of pronouncing "SaaS" as "sass," "XaaS" is sometimes pronounced as "zass."

Related glossary terms: private cloud (internal cloud or corporate cloud), Apache ZooKeeper, Windows Azure, cloud cartography, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Hadoop, hybrid cloud, Windows Azure Fabric Controller (FC), MapReduce, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

This was last updated in August 2010

Posted by: Margaret Rouse

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