Value Proposition for Using Cloud Service Brokers

As mentioned in the Introduction and Motivation section of this chapter, as the cloud offerings become widely used and increasing number of cloud services are available, there is increased value in using an intermediary . This is because the

service consumer has to deal with a number of aspects like integration, identity and access management, governance, service management, service-level agreement management, and security per service provider.

An intermediary /cloud service broker performs a number of services/activities on behalf of the service consumer and thus takes over some of the complexity from the cloud service consumer. The usage of service broker thus simplifi es the usage of cloud services for the cloud consumer.

The cloud service brokers keep track of the latest offers and simplify the job of interfacing with one or more cloud offerings from the point of view of the consumer. This results in overall simplifi cation, not just in terms of interfacing and integration but also of the overall maintenance, management, accounting, billing, and SLA fulfi ll- ment for the solution. The cloud service brokers thus provide specialized expertise to allow an enterprise to focus their limited resources including capital on the core activities. They also allow the employees of an enterprise to focus on their core competencies and core business rather than having to deal with information technology-related issues. The enterprise can be more agile and respond to changes due to the introduction of services provided by cloud service brokers and also gets the collective benefi t of the latest advances provided by the individual cloud services providers.

The following subsections provide a list of high-level benefi ts (divided into func- tional categories) of using a cloud service brokers . The categorization below is mainly for the purpose of defi ning the major benefi ts of the corresponding cloud service brokers , whereby the categories themselves may have interrelationships and intersections among each other.

5.4.1

Simplifi cation and Abstraction

The key value provided by the cloud service broker is in the area of simplifi cation of consumption of services by a cloud service consumer. Rather than dealing with multiple different APIs and interfaces, the service consumer sees a single interface/ API. This helps with the existing problem of lack of standards as the service brokers provide a single interface for interacting with possibly multiple clouds. In addition to easing the job of consuming services, it also makes future refactoring easy as the service broker forms a layer of indirection between the service provider and the consumer and shields the consumer from future changes by the service provider. An example of this type of cloud service broker is Apache [ 19 ] Deltacloud which pro- vides an API that abstracts the differences between clouds.

5.4.2

Aggregation

A cloud service broker may provide an aggregation of multiple services by various cloud vendors – by means of cloud services composition as a single service to the service consumer. Thus, the composition (which may again be dynamic) of services

provided by different cloud service providers and the associated complexity and orchestration is performed by the service broker rather than the consumer. This may be thought of as cloud aggregation /orchestration. An example of this is Aepona’s Services Aggregation and Merchandizing platform [ 20 ] which provides tools that enable service providers to aggregate, merchandize, and deliver a wide range of cloud services. One of the key benefi ts of aggregation is also that the cloud service brokers are able to provide the combined demand for services for a number of cloud service consumers, and this increased buying power helps them to negotiate better conditions on behalf of their clients with the cloud service provider. The cloud ser- vice providers, on the other hand, get an increased number of clients as a result of this integration.

5.4.3

Value Addition

A cloud service broker may perform the function of value addition to the services provided by the cloud service provider. The following are the major areas in which the value addition may be provided.

5.4.3.1 Security, Privacy, and Trust Management

Security, privacy, and trust are the key issues that enterprises consider when moving to the clouds, and the lack of these is a major deterrent for organizations planning to use cloud computing. Cloud service brokers may act on behalf of the providers and/ or consumers to provide the intermediary services that alleviate one or more of the above concerns.

5.4.3.2 Compliance and Auditing

Compliance to location-specifi c and/or domain-specifi c regulatory requirements like those pertaining to Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) [ 21 ], Health Information Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) [ 22 ], Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) [ 23 ], and European Data Privacy Framework [ 24 ] is a functionality that may be provided by a cloud service broker.

5.4.3.3 Management and Monitoring

Management and monitoring of services provided by one or multiple clouds may be performed by a cloud service broker on behalf of the service consumer. Such services may include provisioning, monitoring, job scheduling, policy-based automation, analytics, resource management and virtualization, and workfl ow and workload management.

5.4.3.4 SLA Management

SLA management with possibly multiple providers on behalf of a service consumer is another functionality provided by the service brokers. This helps in the SLA man- agement from the point of view of the service consumer. Some of the examples of cloud service brokers in the value-addition category are Novell’s Cloud Security Service [ 25 ] and CloudSwitch [ 26 ].

5.4.4

Access to Most Suitable Services

As the cloud service providers are proliferating, it may be diffi cult for the service consumer to keep track of the latest cloud services offered and to fi nd the most suit- able cloud service providers based on their criteria. In such cases, the service broker performs the cost calculation of the service(s), thus performing the analysis on behalf of the consumer and providing the most competitive service to the consumer from the palette of available services. This may lead to consumption of the service from a new service provider providing the service at better conditions (based on matching criteria like SLA, costs, fi t, security, energy consumption). Thus, the service broker may be able to move system components from one cloud to another based on user- defi ned criteria such as cost, availability, performance, or quality of service. Cloud service brokers will be able to automatically route data, applications, and infrastruc- ture needs based on key criteria such as price, location (including many legislative and regulatory jurisdictional data storage location requirements), latency needs, SLA level, supported operating systems, scalability, backup/disaster recovery capabilities, and regulatory requirements. There are a number of frameworks and solutions that provide examples of this functionality. Some of them are the RESERVOIR [ 27 ], a framework that allows effi cient migration of resources across geographies and administrative domains, maximizing resource exploitation and minimizing their uti- lization costs; the Intercloud [ 28 ] environment which supports scaling of applica- tions among multiple vendor clouds; and Just in Time [ 29 ] broker which adds value by offering cloud computing without needing to take care of capacity planning but simply discovering, recovering, and reselling resources already amortized and idle. Another approach is provided by FCM [ 30 ], a meta- brokering component providing transparent service execution for the users by allowing the system to interconnect the various cloud broker solutions, based on the number and the location of the utilized virtual machines for the received service requests.

5.4.5 Reliability, Failure Handling, and Disaster Recovery

Service brokers may detect cloud failures and react in an appropriate way to those failures. An example of this is that they may move infrastructure elements from one cloud (public or private) to another in case of failure. A cloud service broker can

improve reliability and decrease vendor lock-in by spreading infrastructure across multiple clouds and can enable disaster recovery into a secondary cloud. Nebulas [ 31 ] is an example of a context-aware system that provides failure handling over heterogeneous environments. Business service management solution from HP [ 32 ] collects system information in real time using alerts instead of scanning and com- bines it with tools for determining the root causes of a problem and automated remediation capability to provide reliability.

5.4.6

Environment Protection

Cloud service brokers may be used to reduce the carbon footprint by optimizing distribution of resources and making data centers energy effi cient by using con- solidation and virtualization. Carbon Aware Green Cloud Architecture [ 33 ] is an example of such a broker-based architecture which promotes carbon effi ciency and addresses the environmental problem from the overall usage of cloud computing resources.