Business Versus Technical Cloud Brokers And Why It Matters
October 28, 2013
Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Michael C. Daconta.
Gartner predicts “By 2015, at least 20% of all cloud services will be consumed via internal or external cloud service brokerages, rather than directly, up from less than 5% today.” Thus, it is important to understand what a cloud broker is and what they do; however, before we can do that, we need to clear up some confusion between different definitions and implementations of cloud brokers.
The term “cloud broker” was defined by NIST in Special Publication 500-292, the NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture, as “An entity that manages the use, performance and delivery of cloud services, and negotiates relationships between Cloud Providers and Cloud Consumers.” The use of the word “entity” makes it ambiguous as to whether a broker is a person or a software service; however, most interpreted this “actor” as a person or persons in a business. NIST divides the broker’s services into three categories service intermediation, service aggregation, and service arbitrage…
Service intermediation means the broker enhances a vendor’s cloud service and provides that enhanced service to the cloud consumer (in essence, “wrapping” the cloud provider’s service to provide enhanced functionality). Service aggregation is where the broker integrates or combines multiple services into a single new service like in the case of data integration. Service arbitrage is where a broker arbitrates between multiple vendors and the client to select the best provider. NIST cleared up the ambiguity of this definition in a later special publication, 500-299, the NIST Cloud Computing Security Reference Architecture where it clearly differentiated between a “cloud business broker” and a “cloud technical broker”. In this article, we will explore the differences between these two concepts and how both are being leveraged today…
Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2013/10/business-versus-technical-cloud-brokers-and-why-it-matters/