I don’t know what I want, but I know that I am not getting it

I am sure you have heard this umpteen times from your customers. This has become the harsh reality for CIOs/ CTOs now with the economic crisis and the proliferation of cloud offerings.

The CIO/ CTO has the onerous task of ensuring dynamic, reliable and always-on IT infrastructure with drastically reduced CAPEX and OPEX budgets. The proliferation of solutions on offer with the claim that their solution is the most apt one is bound to confuse the most clear minded person. Should they opt for public cloud or should it be a private cloud solution? What should be moved to the cloud? What are the risks and how much is it going to save? All these are bound to throw up the above refrain.

Vendor/ Product-neutral solution providers (Gartner calls them Cloud Service Brokers and referred to as CSB hereon) have a major role to play here with a view to ensuring that their end customers get the bang for the buck. The CSB needs to:

Leverage their experience and knowledge of the IT infrastructure operations and marry that with their awareness of the capabilities of each offering to provide the most optimal solution

Innovate & create their own IP and offer value added services to ensure that their customers make the right decisions

The CSB needs to play and advisory role by providing assessment, design, deployment, and migration services. These should be followed by implementation of governance and metrics to drive productivity gains from the deployed solution.

Once this falls in place, the above expression will be rendered meaningless to the great relief of the stressed-out CIO/ CTO.

Tags: Cloud Brokers, Cloud Service Brokers, Cloud Solutions, Microland, Private Cloud, Public Cloud