In the past couple of years, the use of cloud services among organizations has expanded, and many of them often use multiple cloud services from different providers. Getting those services to work together and with maximum effectiveness is becoming increasingly difficult. Cloud brokerage emerged as a way to reduce those complexities and create additional value for cloud service customers. Cloud service broker serves as an intermediary between cloud service providers and the customer, and their main goal is to help deliver those services in a more streamlined way. According to a report from market research firm Gartner, by 2015 most cloud customers will rely on cloud brokers to facilitate consumption of multiple services.
CSBs are becoming valuable partners to cloud computing providers helping them deliver their services to customers and adding value by improving the original service through customization, integration and aggregation of multiple cloud services. Cloud brokers thus focus on a) adjusting cloud services to address specific needs of a customer, b) tying cloud services to on-premises systems, and c) centralizing service provisioning. Cloud service brokers also make sure that services are delivered in the most secure and cost-effective fashion.
By using cloud service brokerage, customers can avoid vendor lock-in and change cloud providers without going through an expensive and time-consuming purchasing process. This is very important for today’s organizations as time to deployment of cloud services is significantly decreased enabling them to meet their business needs and quickly adapt to change. Cloud brokers usually provide services that are not offered by cloud providers, including selection and customization of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and cloud service security assessments.
Forrester divides cloud brokers into three categories. First are what Forrester calls Simple Cloud brokers focused on specific type of cloud services, such as PaaS. Then there are full infrastructure brokers sourcing services across public, virtual private and private Clouds; and finally SaaS brokers offering unified provisioning, billing, and contract management with multiple SaaS offerings.
The role of cloud brokers is becoming increasingly important part of successful cloud strategies, and many industry analysts agree that cloud brokerage is becoming the fastest growing segment of the cloud computing market.