The Emergence of the Cloud Service Broker
Posted by Lauren Ellis on September 16th, 2014
To work with some cloud service providers you need to spend a lot of effort and time managing multiple data streams, multiple passwords and multiple payment processing platforms. It’s not a one-person project and you will likely need a staff that is equipped to help you manage. However, if you are able to manage multiple cloud services, you may find that your profitability increases and you can take advantage of several benefits. To help with this management, a cloud service broker (CSB) can save you time and money.
A CSB is neither a facility nor kind of support offered by cloud services. As a third-party service, a CSB can cut your workload considerably. A CSB adds extra bonuses and values to the services offered by a Cloud service by making it quite simple for you to manage multiple cloud services efficiently without the need for significant knowledge or experience in them. A cloud service broker provides a very simple solution to most of the consumer problems. It is a third party service that you can hire to decrease your considerable amount of workload.
Setting up cloud service with third-party assistance is now getting increasingly common approach for enterprises. It is predicted by market researchers that the annual IT expenditure on CSB services will be $100 billion by the end of this year.
The integration role allows you to connect to a broker and link your cloud services and on premises system. The customization of cloud services involves tweaking of an existing application, or the creation of a new application to run in the cloud settings.
Managing director of THINK strategies, Jeffrey Kaplan says that today's version of system integration is cloud brokerage and aggregation. THINK is a consulting firm that focuses on software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing.
There is another service associated with the cloud brokerage known as arbitrage. Using this service, a broker can move cloud workloads from one cloud service to another. The viability of arbitrage depends on the cost and other factors. Some cloud experts believe that this aspect of the broker model will grow in popularity as technology develops. The chief architect and technology officer of Cloud Technology Partners, Erik Sebesta says that a middleman who will transfer the workloads based on a certain price will not see the benefits or growth because the clients are not interested in it.
Sebesta says, for this model to succeed the middlemen that provide this type of service need to be big players so that the clients can trust them because the transferring of workloads from one environment to another is not a fast or simple process. This is especially so when dealing with “mission critical” applications.
Consulting and technology company Infosys introduced its Cloud Ecosystem Hub, which provides a function that is very similar to arbitrage. The hub wants to provide a single view rather than a fragmented enterprise ecosystem of on-premises systems, public clouds and private clouds, according to company representatives.
It has become clear that for many businesses, the cloud can offer your enterprise a totally different way to deliver solutions to the problems you face with data storage. MoMA CTO Juan Montes feels that the cloud is not much different than an on-premises scenario because the sme principles are addressed by cloud technology as a CTO or CIO. Security, contract management and the ability of vendors to deliver on their promises remain important issues. While the environment has changed, and the payoff has improved, these basic considerations are still important. With changes happening so quickly, there is no doubt that there are is a significant drive to partner these services into a cloud service broker.
Author :
Lauren Ellis is a research analyst covering the technology industry’s top trends & topics, focusing on Cloud Security, Cloud Computing, Cloud Service Broker etc.,
