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If your company is moving parts of
its business to the cloud, you’re probably realizing that it’s not all that simple. Working with many cloud service
providers means managing multiple relationships. In fact, if you’re trying to save money or gain efficiency, you’ll
have more success if you have a little help ensuring that you get what you pay for – and maybe a little bit more.
Most enterprises are already negotiating
multiple contracts with multiple cloud service providers. And multiple contracts mean multiple payments, multiple passwords,
multiple data streams, and multiple providers to check up on. That leads to questions about how you make those services work
together, or how you unify all your efforts so you can get maximum effectiveness and efficiency.
Enter the Cloud Services Brokerage,
or CSB. A cloud services brokerage is a third party company that adds value to cloud services on behalf of cloud service consumers.
Their goal is to make the service more specific to a company, or to integrate or aggregate services, to enhance their security,
or to do anything which adds a significant layer of value (i.e. capabilities) to the original cloud services being offered.
A CSB can make cloud services more valuable
because they work closely with cloud providers to get price breaks or access to more information about how a service works.
In addition, they have more experience working with multiple providers and across many consumer scenarios. Instead of spending
time and money to address these problems internally, consumers can leverage solutions offered by CSBs that allow organizations
to focus on other pressing business needs instead. A viable CSB provider can make it less expensive, easier, safer and more
productive for companies to navigate, integrate, consume and extend cloud services, particularly when they span multiple,
diverse cloud services providers.
A CSB is what gets the consumer out
of the “between a rock and a hard place” problem of not having to become an expert in the details of how a cloud
service is delivered, but also not wanting to simply take the cloud provider’s word completely on faith for how things
should work.
CSBs also
can step in and do triage when a set of cloud services running in your organization has a problem. Cloud service providers
may say that the problem is somewhere other than with them. CSBs can work to minimize these situations by working closely
with each provider, isolating your organization from the problem.
For some organizations, the role of the IT department may even shift to become
a broker for use of cloud services. They will ensure that users of cloud services are not signing duplicate contracts and
that when a SaaS solution needs to be integrated with other business systems that someone is there to help. Sound compelling?
Think about it. As IT staff loses systems and software to manage, brokerage becomes the natural evolution for their role in
the organization.
So whether
you rely on an external CSB or start looking for one in-house, it’s important to recognize that CSBs must be part of
your company’s cloud equation for maximum results. Otherwise, the benefits you realize from moving services outside
the organization may very well be hampered by the mess created inside.
Gartner believes that cloud service brokers (CSBs) are one of the most necessary and attainable opportunities for
service providers, distributors and enterprise IT organizations. CSBs will broker relationships between a service consumer
and multiple cloud providers.
"The future of cloud computing will be permeated with the notion of brokers negotiating relationships between
providers of cloud services and the service customers. In this context, a broker might be software, appliances, platforms
or suites of technologies that enhance the base services available through the cloud. Enhancements will include managing access
to these services, providing greater security or even creating completely new services." (Source: Gartner: "Cloud Consumers
Need Brokerages to Unlock the Potential of Cloud Services")
The
CSB model provides an architectural, business and IT operations model for enabling, delivering and managing different cloud
services within a federated and consistent provisioning, billing, security, administration and support framework. For enterprises,
this model will enable them to unify cloud services management so they can speed up innovation, collaborate on a global scale,
reduce operational costs and grow their bottom line.
For service providers, it will enable them to unify the delivery
of cloud services and differentiate their networks as a true cloud computing platform. And for technology providers, it provides
an opportunity to provide value-added service ecosystems that help differentiate their core offerings to gain market share,
increase customer life-time profitability and enable new channels of distribution. The stakes have never been higher.
Jamcracker - a 'Cool
Vendor' in CSB Enablement
Jamcracker's cloud
aggregation platform enables
service providers, technology providers, and enterprise IT organizations
to operate their own cloud service brokerages. They can aggregate a wide array of pre-integrated cloud services and on-board their own, and deliver them to their customers, through their
channel partners or to their employees.
Businesses are recognizing the benefits
of cloud computing but are often wary of handing over their prized applications to public clouds for fear of insufficient
security and lack of direct control, particularly with public clouds. This has spawned a host of cloud brokers to serve as
intermediaries between end users and cloud providers. (Read more about this topic inGartner defines three opportunities for cloud brokers:
* Cloud Service Intermediation: Building services atop an existing cloud
platform, such as additional security or management capabilities.
* Aggregation: Deploying customer services over multiple cloud
platforms.
* Cloud
Service Arbitrage: Brokers supply flexibility and “opportunistic choices” – and foster competition
between clouds.
To help
you determine which cloud broker fits your needs, we’ve pulled together a list of cloud brokers and open source cloud
management projects (in alphabetical order) with a brief description of their offerings. We will continue to update this list
as new suppliers come on board. Have we missed someone? Send us your feedback.
CloudKick Launched in March 2009 as part of the winter class at start-up incubator Y Combinator,
Cloudkick provides management tools for Amazon and Rackspace. Users monitor their clouds through a dashboard, which also allows
for tagging and color coding of nodes for easier identification. Users can see how their clouds are doing through visualized
graphs. The service is hosted on the SliceHost service owned by Rackspace. Cloudkick also developed the open source project
libcloud, a pure python client library for interacting with Amazon EC2, Slicehost and Rackspace
Cloud Servers. In September Cloudkick 2009 raised $750,000 in funding. Its services are currently free and it is working on
a suite of commercial offerings.
CloudSwitch CloudSwitch
claims to move data center applications to clouds without modification, allowing customer to manage their apps from within
the datacenter using existing tools and processes. Established in 2008, its beta customers have been using Amazon EC2, but
CloudSwitch plans to support other platforms from Rackspace, Microsoft, VMware and Terremark. CloudSwitch is delivered as
a software appliance and contains the management components for discovering applications, orchestrating cloud deployments,
and managing cloud usage, the company explains. Its CloudFit function automatically selects the appropriate combination of
processor, memory, and storage. Secure communication and storage services are automatically provisioned via a local control
point within each cloud deployment. These are virtual instances that run on behalf of the enterprise user and manage the cloud
infrastructure, including data management, synchronization, and long-duration data transfers.
CohesiveFT CohesiveFT says it has been providing enterprise-grade virtualization and cloud
products since 2006. It’s flagship products are Elastic Server, Context-Cubed, and VPN-Cube. Elastic Server is a multi-cloud
virtual server image design and management system, Context Cubed is a cloud topology management software, and Elastic Server
is a multicloud server image design and management system.
DeltaCloud An open source project aimed to develop an ecosystem of tools, scripts and applications for the cloud. The project
also aims to write a common, REST-based API to enable developers to write once and manage across multiple clouds. Cloud supported
include Amazon EC2, RHEV-M RackSpace and RimHosting, and private clouds based on VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
ManagerWith Amazon.com among its investors, Elastra says it
enables enterprises to use their legacy applications in public and private clouds. In November 2009, it announced Elastra
Cloud Server (ECS) 2.0, Enterprise Edition, which enables applications based on Oracle databases and WebLogic Application
Servers and integrated with management tools such as Tivoli and OpenView to be used on private VMware or Citrix clouds, or
Amazon’s public cloud. There is a free version of ECS running on Amazon Web Services, while the commercial Enterprise
Edition is aimed at private data centers. For more, seeElastra Cloud Server Extends SaaS.
enStratusEnStratus offers a cloud management platform for enterprise
applications running on Amazon and Rackspace clouds. In addition to offering the usual configuration and monitoring of cloud
resources, enStratus claims its security architecture offers up to six nines of availability. All customer data is stored
on enStratus’ servers running on redundant virtualized environments on dedicated physical servers. The data centers
are located in downtown Minneapolis. EnStratus operates three VLANs; two house the Web console, Web services, and provisioning
systems, and are accessible from the public Internet. A third houses customer credentials and is not addressable from the
public Internet. The file systems are encrypted using SHA256 encryption.
Eucalyptus Systems Eucalyptus is an open source private cloud platform that enables customers to build private clouds that are compatible
with public clouds such as Amazon EC2. Customers will test out their applications on their private clouds with a view to moving
them to public clouds. Eucalyptus software has been adopted by Canonical as the engine behind the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud
(UEC), which is bundled with Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition. Customers include Eli Lilly, NASA and Argonne Leadership Computing
Facility.
Kaavo Kaavo offers enterprise management of cloud services
from Amazon, Flexiscale and GoGrid. Kaavo’s IMOD provides security atop of those public clouds by configuring firewalls
and VPN connectivity with both the cloud server and an internal data center or network. Kaava uses AES-256 bit encryption.
IMOD monitors the application service levels and takes appropriate actions based on predefined workflows in the System Definition
for the application. The System Definition also enables customers to configure multiserver configurations with different operating
systems and middleware.
Layer7 Techologies Layer
7 Technologies is approaching cloud computing with a background in service-oriented architecture and Web services security.
Its SecureSpan XML Virtual Appliance supports VMware/ESX and supports both private and public clouds. It enables customers
to implement policies that manage requests to cloud apps, and controls, monitors and adapts public, private and hybrid clouds.
A cloud vendor SLA enforcement feature measures and tracks cloud service provider performance; and supports strict failover
between public and private cloud providers, round robin, best effort and latency-based routing.
LTech LTech was originally set up as a Google Enteprise
Partner, working with customers to deploy Google Apps and the Google Search Appliance. It later added cloud services to its
portfolio and is a partner of Amazon Web Services and RightScale. Its services for enterprise cloud customers include cloud
assessment (recommending either a public, private or hybrid cloud), proof of concept, production migration, and management/training.
In January 2009, LTech merged with IT consultancy The Matlen Silver Group, which provides project management and IT staffing
to the financial and pharmaceuticals industries.
RightScale RightScale offers a cloud management platform that enables organizations to deploy and manage applications across
multiple clouds. At the core is RightScale’s Server Templates, which the company says differs from emerging common cloud
APIs because the templates enable users to “take advantage of the unique capabilities of different clouds.” ISVs
build one server template that automatically installs their software on other supported cloud infrastructures. RightScale
is based on Opscode Chf, an open source server configuration management framework. Customers can select,
migrate and monitor clouds of their choosing from a single management environment. RightScale supports clouds from Amazon
Web Services, Eucalyptus Systems, Flexiscale, GoGrid, and VMware. For more see RightScale and Managed Clouds Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland with offices
in London, Paris and Washington D.C., Vordel is an XML and service-oriented architecture appliance specialist. The beta of
its Vordel Cloud Service Broker was launched in November 2009, and the service is scheduled for release in the first quarter
of 2010. The service manages multidomain cloud services by registering them in a single repository to enable monitoring and
policy enforcement
Zimory
is a spinoff of Deutsche Telekom, and claims to be the first online marketplace for cloud computing,
bringing buyers and sellers of computing resources. Zimory Public Cloud for sellers aggregates available server capacity from
around the world and makes it available through an Internet trading platform, according to the company. Buyers purchase capacity
using Zimory Public Cloud, with Zimory handling pricing, contracts, security, virtual machine migration, and billing. Customers
can choose the geographical location of the physical data center, and Zimory provides a choice of three levels of quality
of service. Customers choose from a range of appliances, from a simple Linux or Windows image to fully-configured application
stack.