Key Takeaways:

• As-a-service comes with all the necessary hardware, software and supporting people to deliver a mission capability or an outcome in a turnkey package. 
• Government agencies leveraging as-a-service do not need to make their own investments in technologies and solution/capability infrastructure and talent and can acquire-to-need from providers in the commercial marketplace.
• A service integration and management partner like SAIC has partnerships with commercial providers and works with them to help agencies optimize their as-a-service delivery and pricing plans, reducing risk and increasing the likelihood of successful outcomes.

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Using as-a-service solutions and capabilities enables government agencies to adopt the latest commercial technologies and integrate them into their missions without requiring continuous capital investments in infrastructure, assets and talent. Popularized by commercial service providers, this delivery model now brings a host of financial, risk-reducing and agile benefits to customers in the public sector.

In traditional solution acquisition scenarios, agencies procure technology hardware, software and people and then run the solutions themselves or hire contractors to manage them. With as-a-service, all of these resource elements are included in a turnkey capability package or an outcome-based solution that is delivered at a fixed unit price.

The as-a-service delivery model naturally fits traditional IT needs like compute and storage, but it is expanding across solutions of all types, referred to as anything/everything as-a-service, or XaaS. Because so much of what we do now is cloud driven, nearly any kind of complete solution or capability can be delivered as-a-service from hosted resources.

For example, in digital engineering-as-a-service, agencies can purchase subscription-based access to a robust and secure cloud environment, built and managed by SAIC, with a full-lifecycle suite of the best commercial modeling, visualization, simulation and analysis applications for their engineers to conduct their workloads.

Technology integrators that have deep agency mission experience and partnerships with commercial service providers, like SAIC, can implement a variety of capabilities and outcome-based solutions as-a-service into government systems securely and efficiently.

The types of XaaS capabilities and solutions run the gamut and include:

• Engineering, including digital engineering and safety engineering
• Software development, with a DevSecOps tool chain for applications
• Data on-demand, where SAIC provides a platform as-a-service for retrieval of specific data sets from commercial data products upon need
• Hyperautomation, which automates enterprise business processes and IT workflows using multiple technologies that include robotic process automation, AI and machine learning
• User experience and support, which integrates intelligent virtual agents (chatbots) and machine-learning automation to supercharge enterprise IT services and operations and is supplemented by a live service desk
• Enterprise operations center, for continuous monitoring of IT infrastructure events
• Cybersecurity analysis, providing situational awareness and supporting governance, risk and compliance analysis

An efficient and scalable operating model

XaaS is a great way for agencies to match the speeds and pivots of today’s missions. Using it for emerging capabilities as well as tried-and-true needs, customers can choose from à la carte or bundled services, as well as different options in how providers meter their services for consumption and billing.

Agencies can purchase services at the time of need, or whenever they expect to need the services, and pay for just those instances. Or they can leverage fixed or flexible subscriptions, where services are scaled up or down depending on demand and agencies pay for what they consume within a time period. Being a service integrator, SAIC helps agencies obtain cost-saving delivery and pricing structures by working with provider partners.

As-a-service is not only readily available and reliable, with providers delivering services from their vast infrastructures and resources in utilities-like fashion, it alleviates agencies from operations and maintenance costs and removes obsolescence risks amid increasingly rapid technology advancements. Agencies take advantage of the continuous innovations and improvements that providers put into their services.

With the cloud-based XaaS services, you:

• No longer purchase infrastructure and resources. This includes compute and storage, servers and any other hardware needed to provide capacity. Instead, the service providers supply virtual machines, platforms and anything that can be metered for consumption and billing as part of the capability or solution.
• Pay only for services used. This could include CPU, RAM and storage consumed, or the performance requirements for those resources.
• Receive reliable availability of services. This includes elastic scalability, uptimes and support during times of peak needs, as providers match capacity to demand.
• Expand and pull back consumption as needed. Rather than over-engineering a solution by yourself, save on costs of ownership and always have access to the most up-to-date resources and other innovations from the commercial marketplace.
• Benefit from the providers’ security investments. Leverage environments that have already been approved by the government and are compliant for secure and critical work.

Cloud services are still mainstays of as-a-service

Many government customers call on SAIC to help them operate and manage their hybrid and multi-cloud environments that use public cloud service providers (CSPs) and their inherent platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service resources. SAIC helps them broker, assemble and integrate offerings from various CSPs and then centrally manages their environments with our cloud management platform.

This includes tracking costs and performance, managing governance around which CSPs or locations in the environment are authorized to handle specific workloads, and turning on and off capacity as needed, so that the customer only pays for what is used.

It's all about modernizing the way capabilities and solutions are delivered to our customers and making their operations as efficient as possible.