The analysis and continuous improvement of business processes (BPs) has a strategic relevance for those enterprises that strongly rely on the performance of their operational processes to deliver services and/or goods to customers. The adoption of Modeling & Simulation (M&S) approaches is widely recognized as a valuable solution for analyzing and improving BPs, even though it is not yet fully exploited, due to the required know-how, effort and cost. In this context, M&S as a Service (MSaaS) is a promising paradigm that contributes to effectively ease the introduction of M&S approaches in the BP lifecyle, by saving the investments required to build and maintain the needed hardware and software infrastructure. This paper first illustrates a survey that analyzes the state-of-The-Art regarding the adoption of M&S approaches in the BP domain and then, starting from a set of identified open issues, proposes a next generation MSaaS architecture which aims at enabling a time-And cost-effective M&S-based analysis of BPs. © 2017 Society for Modeling & Simulation International (SCS).