Cloud Broker - Essentials for a Cloud Service Brokerage Platform

Cloud Broker - Essentials for a Cloud Service Brokerage Platform

By John Katrick

Cloud technology has become exponentially accepted for companies all over the world, providing a platform for them to run their sensitive and critical operations, therefore cloud services are now more than ever a very integral part of the ICT infrastructures exploited by companies from many different industries.

According to Gartner, Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB) is an ICT role and business model in which a company or other entity adds value to one or more (public or private) cloud services on behalf of one or more consumers of that service via three primary roles including;

Aggregation: this involves combining and integrating multiple services, examples are; data integration, safeguarding process integrity and ensuring data portability between the cloud customer and the various CSP.

Service Intermediation: this is the provision of value-added services or basically improving a capability without actually providing any of the cloud services itself. These services may include identity and access management, security management and reporting, or supervision on pricing and billing.

Service Arbitrage: Some cloud broker services providers are not directly involved in cloud customer contact, but rather enable other cloud broker services providers to provide their brokerage services. Examples of these cloud brokerage enablers are providers of cloud aggregation platforms or other (software) technology that enable aggregation providers to combine various cloud services into one or more aggregated services to the cloud customer.

Benefits of Cloud Service Brokerage

CSB has significantly reduced processing costs, increase flexibility and reduced downtime as global offices, suppliers and other partners in the production chain can share information at real time with each other. Additional benefits attached with using a cloud services broker include:

Integrated service management: Integrated service management provides key services, such as backup and recovery, resiliency, and security. These services ensure that your system is running all year round.

Access to IT resources anytime, anywhere: Cloud services remove your data from their physical silos and makes them readily available for use whenever and wherever you need them.

Flexible scaling of resources: with advancing years and changes in business, so also there is a change in your data needs. There are plans in place to help scale your data solution investments with your current needs for maximum resource optimization.

Lowers total cost of ownership (TCO): Expedite delivery of your complex data projects helps reduce capital expenditures.

Automated self-service delivery: automation simplifies and speeds up the integration and deployment of services. CSB provides options to automate your services and the possibility of designing the automation as your needs require.

Essentials for a Cloud Service Broker Platform

Services Catalogue Management: A platform for enterprises and service providers to showcase the services offered.

Cloud Orchestration and Delivery: For multi-cloud infrastructure service, you need a provisioning and orchestration framework that can support multiple clouds and transform your IT department into a self-service organization.

Billing and Payment Engine: It should be able to monetize your process, integrate with critical applications, and account and charge for cloud services used, it can also interface with various payment gateways in real time.

User Provisioning and Administration: A CSB platform should enable self-service provisioning of users and apps (services), manage users' identities and provide them with timely access to applications and data.

Roles-Based Access Controls: A CSB platform should provide an efficient way to restrict access to various functions of the cloud management platform.

Identity and Policy Management: Provision of automated solutions to enforce access policy proactively and detect existing violations in a users' environment.

Budgeting and Spend Management: It should provide governance and budget management for cloud services by letting IT track every expense from beginning to end.

Monitoring and Dashboard: IT needs to monitor cloud infrastructure performance continuously and identify and resolve issues that arise promptly and also provide visibility into the organization's cloud usage.

Extensible Reporting Framework: It should empower customers the ability to securely build, generate, save own reports as per their personal needs and also a centralized database for reporting data from varying live feeds of users should be available.

Article Source: Cloud Broker - Essentials for a Cloud Service Brokerage Platform