As cloud services become bigger and bigger, the cloud is in need of cloud broker services, which are essential to delivering quality service to users.

A cloud broker simplifies the connection between a customer and the cloud provider. Cloud brokers aggregate, integrate and customize the services offered. One business might try to use three different services for mail, sales, and platform. A cloud broker streamlines this process and makes coordination among the different sectors easy.

Aggregation

A cloud broker can bundle many different services together and present them as a single product. For instance, by partnering with a cloud broker, a provider can offer a unified billing service or unified cloud provisioning.

Integration

Often information needs to be consolidated and transferred from one platform to another. The data in the cloud is consolidated by the broker to create consistent units and formats of information.

Customization

Self-explanatory. A cloud broker can adjust the service depending on the individual customer’s need.

A cloud broker is not only a service provider, but it can also be a valuable partner. Cloud consultants can keep a relationship between business and customer active. A broker can also provide the services a business may not have, but do need, such as customized user interface design or integrating the customer’s business apps with a mobile solution the business provides.

A cloud broker can negotiate better prices for its clients and deliver more customers by combining the power of a number of providers. “When a broker is doing work for hundreds of customers, they can aggregate pricing, and lower prices usually mean more business for the cloud provider,” said Daryl Plummer, vice president of one IT company.

Security

One shaky aspect of cloud computing is its security. Firewalls and virus detection help, but by nature a collaborative system such as cloud software is vulnerable, and it’s difficult to isolate security threats before they reach the network.

Generally, business who provide cloud services don’t have the time or expertise to sort out vulnerabilities, but a cloud broker can adjust the security within the cloud or even within the customer’s system. This frees the business to focus on the rest of its services and gain peace of mind.