Software as a Service is often the first step companies take into the cloud. But, today’s cloud providers offer on-demand services for a wide range of business and IT functions. We’ve moved beyond SasS, PaaS, and IaaS into an ‘Everything as a Service’ or XaaS world.

In their 2017 research report, Everything as a Service: Why companies are making the switch to SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, and more, Tech Pro Research (TechRepublic’s sister site) outlined several trends in the “as-a-service” movement.

Businesses use 2-3 services on average and email is most often outsourced service

Among the survey respondents, Tech Pro Research found that companies used an average of 2-3 cloud services for both IT operations and non-IT business functions. The most popular service, which shouldn’t come as a surprise, was email. Productivity apps, such as word processing and spreadsheets were second, followed by video conferencing. Within IT, the most often used services were datacenter and computing, backup and disaster recovery, network infrastructure, and databases.

Download the special report: The future of Everything as a Service (free PDF)

Easier maintenance, lower costs, and increased speed drive cloud service adoption

Three three critical concerns dominated the list of reasons companies made the jump to cloud services; maintenance, cost, and speed. Half of respondents picked automatic maintenance as why they use external vendors instead of in-house IT. Right behind that, 45 percent indicated that the cost of maintaining and deploying these services was less. And the same number said that not only are deployments cheaper, but they’re also faster.

Cloud providers solve problems in-house IT staff can’t

Money and maintenance were also on respondents’ minds when Tech Pro Research asked them about the positive and negative experiences they’d had with cloud service providers.

Over half of respondents said their cloud providers “keep systems running so we don’t have to worry about maintenance.” Not having to worry about disaster recovery and saving money, were also at the top of the list. More interestingly however, businesses also reported that vendors are solving problems that in-house IT staff can’t.

The most often reported negative outcomes were unresponsive customer service departments, constant vendor personnel turnover, and constant price increases.

Everything as a Service infographic and research report

Tech Pro Research condensed many of the key findings from their everything as a service report into the infographic shown below. You can also download the full report from TechRepublic and ZDNet’s premium content site, Tech Pro Research. The report contains more information such as which cloud vendors businesses are using most often for both business and IT functions.

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