What’s a cloud services broker, and why do you need one?

Grazed from CIO. Author: Chris Carroll.

The proportion of cloud services purchased through cloud brokers is growing, and Gartner predicts it will soon make up a substantial portion of cloud purchases. The appeal of a cloud broker is obvious: It allows the enterprise to leverage specialized expertise to provision expensive and complicated services. But what is a cloud services broker (CSB), and why do so many companies need one? What’s the impact of CSBs on IT, and should brokering the cloud be done externally or can it be as an internal IT function?

The Role of a Cloud Services Broker

As organizations continue to turn to cloud computing, the demand for specialized expertise to provision the optimal cloud offerings for enterprise business and technical requirements is rapidly increasing. This has led to the swift emergence of CSBs, who help the enterprise with all things cloud: from evaluating cloud service providers to negotiating contracts and documenting cloud vendor deliverables…

Internal Versus External Brokering

But is it worth paying the fees for an external firm, equipment vendor or consultant to serve as a broker, when instead IT staff could do it themselves? Today, many companies lack experience in analyzing cloud services and negotiating contracts with cloud vendors. Instead, they opt to use external CSBs to augment existing IT resources and accelerate institutional learning so the organization can broker cloud resources internally in the future…

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