Cloud brokering platform vendors act as intermediaries between cloud providers and cloud consumers that assist companies in choosing the services and offerings that best suits their needs. Most of the available CBPs today for SaaS support commercial service providers. These providers’ objectives are usually to broker SaaS services via an online or offline marketplace to external customers.
Let’s take a look at how an organization can evaluate CBPs correctly.
Determine that the Broker Understands Business needs
Before signing a contract with a CBP, make sure that the CBP understands your business needs and requirements. A clear understanding must be established on the part of the CBP about the various project stages. These stages are development, staging, actual production and lifecycle management. Your organization should define clearly the kind of services it expects and conduct a thorough check of the service level agreements of the brokerage. Organizations also need to ascertain that the CSB vendors have the capability of integrating analytics with API requirements. If the brokerage vendor understands and interprets your needs correctly, they can suggest the best model that suits your organization.
Make an Evaluation Template
It’s imperative that your organization consider all the factors, including the security angle, while identifying potential brokers and signing a contract with them. Security is the most important aspect that needs to be taken into consideration by organizations dealing with CBPs. It is important that the CBP vendor suggest you the best available service providers so that you can mitigate the risk to a large extent. Thus, while choosing a broker, you must create an evaluation template which can address questions like the following:
- What allowances does the broker provide, if any glitches are caused by the cloud vendor while accessing or requesting for any security-related configuration files, developed application code, or policy or quality assurance and testing documents?
- How will the CBP designate a customer contact in the event of a breach or security issue?
Ascertain the Value-Add Proponent
CIOs must choose a CBP vendor who can offer value-added services such as providing sufficient benefits to developers. Today, the market has become extremely competitive. That is why cloud service brokerages are offering other value added services, apart from just being able to aid organizations in procuring the required cloud infrastructure, applications and software. Additionally, given the fact that by using cloud SaaS, you will get unlimited computing capacity, a CSB should be able to guide the organization to plan the workload, make a cost optimization plan and ensure that the organization is gaining maximum ROI from the investments put in migrating to the cloud.
As cloud services have become ubiquitous, organizations are becoming increasingly clear about migrating their applications to the cloud. Despite the advantages CBPs provide, they come with risks. Experts agree that CIOs should make sure that the CBP vendors should have associations with numerous cloud SaaS providers before entering into a contract. This way, an organization will get a wider variety of vendor options and select the one who suits their needs. Use these three methods to select appropriate CBPs for cloud SaaS service.
