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Disrupt the market as Cloud Broker #2 Use-Cases


Friday, 14 July 2017

The last Cloud Broker blog shows an overview about the market drivers. The following use-cases can be used to create a business model for cloud brokerage.

Shadow IT

It is a huge risk and lack of control inside an organization. It starts by using cloud file sharing and the possibility of leaking important company paper like NDAs. People use also not managed cloud server. These assets are not compliant, unsecure and can be a huge security risk of the company. But it is also a big opportunity for cloud broker.

Cloud Brokerage as Service

What happens if a cloud service of a customer goes down? Who is the first level support that can the customer talk to? This should be not a website or a form. Who is responsible that the service is not reachable anymore? Using Public Cloud services leaves customers alone, causing the responsibility model between provider and customer. The local cloud broker is for customers the single point of contact.  They don’t not need to talk to the public cloud provider. Building the right design for specific infrastructure requirements of the applications is not easy. If the customers go into the cloud by themselves, the cloud architect who implemented is responsible for service losses and the public cloud provider refers to their SLAs. Using service by cloud broker meeting 100% compliancy and security to reach high standards. The country compliances are known and automatically applied in the background for the end customer. The single point of contact and consultancy is trading off if we have strong compliance rules that stick to the country.

Managed Services

Traditional outsourcing of services means shifting processes. The evolution brings automation in the picture with the involvement of cloud broker as technology provider. We need to be compatible with digital transformation paradigms as the most important driver in the market today. The key enabler of the paradigm are flexibility and agility. Most companies on the road are quite new with this topic. All Organizations consists out of processes, data, systems and a network to support strategical and tactical decisions. Regarding this advantage cloud adoption enabled by cloud brokerage makes sense for the line of business (LOB). Standardized interfaces of the LOB for private and public cloud technologies are needed without exception. Businesses with small size have bigger potential in adoption rate regarding flexibility. The decision between make and buy is very important. Shifting into direction of CAPEX to OPEX model means buying services. This opens a wide are of possibilities and can catalyze the process in direction of cloud. Organizations are able to grow with the business but also to shrink. Cloud Brokerage uses standards and brings further security regarding compliance, data security and protection.

Compliance & Governance

Cloud broker manage services for customers and are forced to meet compliance rules of the country, cantons and companies. The provider and cloud broker enables the movement of data. But the customer needs to be compliant regarding the country rules and data protection. This forces us to remember the law regarding what kind of data we are juggle with. The cloud broker can take this headache away from customers and consult what kind of data are allowed in what country.

Simplification Cloud Services

An important driver for the digital transformation is the simplification of services. The cloud broker provides an easy to use self-service portal which can be used by the end customer. The complex workflow stays in the background and is abstracted with automation. The cloud broker has also the possibility to compete with the cloud provider by learning from the customers problems and how to solve them.

Benchmark of public clouds

Metered usage of cloud services means also transparency. The customer wants to know how cloud A vs. cloud B performs regarding the performance and costs. This functionality can be offered as advanced services and is unique in the industry. Cloud provider itself has partly this functionality but not across multiple clouds like Cisco CloudCenter provides.

Customized Application Architecture

The centric peace of all services are applications. Architectures can be very different between the applications. To build an own application inside a specific cloud is not easy. The public cloud lock-in effect starts in the moment if you use provided tools like application architecture editors and automation. Because you are not able to export this models or use this information to build the same application inside another cloud. You need to start every time from the beginning. The cloud broker takes this issue away from the customer and enables compatibility of the application model and automation layer between the cloud provider.

Application Elasticity

Create an application with supported elasticity is difficult. Creating the enabled inside a public cloud is also unique in every public cloud. The cloud broker provides with Cisco CloudCenter an out-of-the-box implementation of this future. The customer can benefit from day one and can enable new deployed services for elasticity.

Custom Application

Cloud broker technologies enable the simple consumption of services. The public cloud services are not available from day one. This is dependent on the market and the kick-off phase already started. Customers may want to stick to their grown applications with old application architectures. The cloud broker can help to create the custom services as consultancy and mitigate between old and new application modelling methods.

Custom Application as Self-Service

The Cisco CloudCenter broker technology enable the simple creation of own application models. The governance model is used to secure application building blocks. Customers can create their own application architectures with predefined service building blocks, secure and simple.

Local Support

The support and the head of big public cloud provider are not sitting in the town of the customers. The customer has quite less chance to get local support. This is an important topic to consider, but it only plays out If the customer runs into issues. The cloud broker paradigm solves this kind of problems. Local contact persons can be called for preference. Service consumer benefit from the local communication with better understanding of the situation and language.

The next blog shows an example what services can be created by the presented Use-Cases in combination with Cisco Cloud Center.

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