10 Reasons Cloud-Service Brokerages Are Seeing Solid Growth

by Chris Preimesberger

Growth in competition is leaving organizations managing multiple services from multiple vendors and, consequently, multiple registration, billing, provisioning, security, administration, support and licensing requirements. The complexity of having to manage all this on your own can be overwhelming for IT departments and can be significantly lessened or eliminated through a CSB.

The number of cloud services on the market today is vast and growing daily. Amazon alone has doubled its services in the past year and is adding a service a day. As a result, it’s almost impossible for the end users to keep up with available services. A cloud broker can categorize the list of services available across multiple clouds, making it easier for users to identify useful services.

Once the brokerage is set up, it can be useful as a way to compare services and prices across clouds. You could imagine a tool that does comparison-shopping for you—much like what is available in retail today.

When clouds are categorized by a broker, new businesses can be derived from this. For example, a cloud may advertise “available space for rent” within the brokerage, allowing others to bid/buy space at discounted rates. Here, “space” refers to virtual or physical resources. There are companies trying to do this today, but a brokerage allows a central hub to perform this type of cloud bartering.

Think of a cloud brokerage as a shopping mall. In a mall, you typically have anchor stores, inexpensive stores and high-end stores. We know them by brand names: Target, Nordstrom, Kohl’s, Macy’s and so on. Other than Amazon, there really isn’t much brand recognition in the cloud space. A brokerage can act as a mall and offer low- to high-end capabilities by price, service-level agreement (SLA) or security.

As the name applies, the cloud broker acts on behalf of the end user and the vendor, and matches user requests with the appropriate vendor cloud. This is a powerful concept that is missing in the cloud market today—having an advocate for your best interests.

Because cloud technologies and frameworks are relatively new, not every IT department is a cloud expert. Cloud brokers can help determine the best framework for an organization’s needs. They can also provide provisioning assistance, budget guidance and assist in integrating disparate services across multiple hybrid environments.

Cloud brokers can provide a simplified interface, including the ability for single sign-on. This would enable simplified management across cloud resources, masking the complexity that comes with working with multiple providers.

Because cloud brokers do business on a regular basis with cloud-service providers, they often can negotiate better terms and prices than an end-user organization can do so on their own.

One of the potential problems with using multiple cloud services is determining where a problem starts when one occurs. The cloud-service provider may point back to your own infrastructure or network. A cloud broker can do the triage needed to identify where the problem is coming from and act on your behalf to resolve issues that originate with a cloud service provider.