Anything-as-a-service, or XaaS, refers to the growing diversity of services available over the Internet via cloud computing as opposed to being provided locally, or on premises. Also known as everything-as-a-service, anything-as-a-service reflects the vast potential for on-demand cloud services and is already being heavily marketed and promoted by companies like VMware and HP.
Anything-as-a-service derives the “X” in its XaaS acronym as a result of being a catch-all term for everything from software-as-a-service (SaaS) to storage-as-a-service, desktop-as-a-service (DaaS), disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS), network-as-a-service (NaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and even emerging services such as marketing-as-a-service and healthcare-as-a-service.
