Benefits of Using a Cloud Services Broker

Date posted: 2nd October 2015

Top Benefits in Using a Cloud Services Broker

Using a cloud managed services broker is an efficient and cost effective way to leverage the benefits of the cloud, but to also take advantage of the expertise of a trusted partner to use the right cloud resources for the right requirement at the right time.

There are four major benefits in using a cloud managed services broker:

1) Broader Technical Expertise: As organizations’ IT architectures become increasingly diverse, it’s important not to be locked in to a single service provider’s approach that limits options or gets in the way of interoperability. Using a cloud service broker platform, based on open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), increases flexibility and enables the aggregation of a range of cloud services.

By using an experienced cloud service broker, organizations can leverage the collective skills, certifications and experiences the broker’s team has built up in working across numerous infrastructures, applications and tools. This can be a huge benefit in enabling better security because this vast technical expertise can more easily identify diverse security risks and quickly remediate problems. And since the cloud broker is aggregating services from a variety of sources, it already has made significant investment in ways to enable data migration, data mobility and interoperability from across platforms and services.

2) Lower Total Cost of Ownership – Financial Returns: By facilitating greater adoption of cloud computing, capital expenditures are typically reduced—one of the most sought after benefits of cloud computing adoption by IT and business executives alike. But the financial benefits of using a service broker go well beyond Capex reduction. For instance, the broker can take the lead in negotiating improved terms on behalf of the client with the different service providers in such areas as pricing, service-level agreements and discounts. Additionally, a CSB’s experience and consulting skills helps organizations in streamlining the procurement process and reducing the amount of cycles required to effectively evaluate service providers. Finally, a CSB can provide unified and consolidated billing, and of course provides a much more predictable cost assumption for budgeting purposes.

3) Operational efficiencies: Look for a cloud service broker that has a diverse portfolio of cloud service provider relationships and leverage their broker contracts for support and service levels. With service providers geographically dispersed, you can access cloud services quicker and more efficiently to enhance application performance, maintain a strong backup and disaster recovery plan, or other geo-location benefits. Using a cloud service provider also can facilitate faster onboarding of new services, such as cloud-based applications, infrastructure or security, while at the same time making it easier and faster to decommission cloud services established for short term or pilot projects. Cloud Managed Services also is greatly eased through the service broker platform’s single-pane-of-glass management console. The CSB can also act as a single point of contact for support and SLA accountability across all your cloud service vendors.

4) Better options in dealing with risk, compliance and governance: An experienced and proven CSB will give your organization access to a wide breadth of procurement knowledge, spanning multiple service providers’ areas of expertise and compliance certifications such as HIPAA, FedRAMP or PCI across multiple vertical industries, spheres of competence and geographic focus. By facilitating the use of multiple service providers, the broker also gives your organization the ability to more easily plan for reliable application and workload migration and disaster recovery in case a service provider suffers unexpected downtime or runs into unforeseen business difficulties. The geographic reach of a CSB platform also enables more efficient means to comply with international data privacy regulations which can affect how applicationsand workloads leverage cloud storage. Finally, the broker’s governance capability, role-based access features and monitoring enable organizations to enhance control over cloud service consumption and spending.