Clarifying Confusion Surrounding Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS)

The 2011 NIST Cloud Computing Reference Model defined three cloud service models: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In the following decade, the suffix “as-a-service” became a popular shorthand to describe solutions offered on a pay-as-you-go basis with characteristics of elasticity and self-service procurement. This phrase has since been used for an increasing variety of services, not all related to information and communication technologies (ICT), to the point that the abbreviations XaaS and AaaS, both meaning “Anything-as-a-Service” have surfaced to denote this trend. This proliferation creates a risk of confusion among end users, especially since the same abbreviation is sometimes used with different meanings. The recently published XaaS Glossary was generated to dispel this potential confusion. It consists of a list of forty-eight terms and their definitions, and a set of references to the sources or definitions of those terms. Join us for this webinar as the presenters help disambiguate these uncertainties of cloud service models.