Solution Providers, New Cloud Brokers

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As enterprise IT deploys private clouds to increase buiness agility and reduce costs, these companies also want to increase their amount of work in public clouds to meet the ongoing needs of their business.

Between clouds and earth

Solution providers who can transform into cloud brokers and act as intermediaries between these companies and cloud service providers will prosper.

The concept of "cloud broker" is not new to 2015. What is still new in 2015 is the opportunity to play this role in a marketplace that is growing.

Cloud brokers will find themselves managing across private clouds within corporate data centers, within hyperscaled cloud providers (like Amazon, Google or Microsoft) and within large public cloud service providers such as BT, Orange Business Services, Telekom and Vodaphone

Their customers benefit because the heated competition among these giant cloud companies is creating a new range of options and price points for the delivery of IT services.  In fact, these customers--by buying and using your services-- also consider themselves as in-house "cloud brokers."

Cloud brokers will need to wed their IT experience to an always-up-to-date cloud knowledge (best-of-breed solutions as well as the challengers) to this rapidly evolving environment. 

Not to mention some technical negotiating skills required to cut deals that include critical points such as data control, SLAs, governance and security. 

According to a worldwide survey of IT executive members from CIO LinkedIn Forum (commissioned by NetApp and conducted by IDG Research Services), respondents’ organizations arealready deploying multiple cloud models, and expect that more than half of all IT services at their organizations will be delivered via cloud three years from now.

For example, the majority of respondents expect to deploy  Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) within three years, while more than two-thirds (71%) expect IaaS will be  deployed within 18 months. 

They also expect that the use of all cloud models (public, private and hybrid) will increase at their organizations over the next 18 months.

Respondents say nearly one-third of their total data will be deployed to either public or hybrid clouds within 18 months, a precipitous 100 percent increase over the amount of data they say is currently being housed in either a public or hybrid cloud. Not surprisingly, a majority of respondents plan to employ public cloud platforms based on VMware or Microsoft technology with a smaller but growing number opting for hyperscale and open source cloud alternatives.

It's not too late to become a Cloud Broker. In the revolutionary world of cloud computing, there are still many opportunities to demonstrate solution provider leadership by offering a roadmap that employs advanced cloud services to support business objectives. 

The first phase in this process includes assessing short- and long-term IT goals. Next, a cloud broker evaluates competing cloud offerings to determine which services are compatible with user requirements,including such important criteria as performance, SLAs and governance. Then the solution provider can interview potential cloud providers, check case studies & customer references and negotiate business terms.

This is an on-going process that is constantly monitored (even repeated) as needs evolve and new cloud services become available.

The big selling point is ROI: more than two-thirds of respondents report their organizations have seen reduced provisioning times, increased efficiencies and lower costs, which they directly attribute to cloud deployments.

The payoff? Steady business with re-occuring revenue as the solution provider becomes The Cloud Broker of choice for its customer base.

Think this applies only for large enterprises? Actually a parallel opportunity exists in SMBs (and even micro-enterprises) where cloud broker expertise can introduce and apply cloud to save money and time-- as well as increase business performance. The palette of cloud products and services may be very different, but the role of cloud brokers will remain as constant as the North Star in the sky.

Go Gartner on Cloud Brokers