Cloud Brokering: Current Practices and Upcoming Challenges

Abstract

This invited article looks at the practical and legal implications of cloud brokering, in which cloud service brokers act as intermediaries between cloud service providers and customers.he International Organization for Standardization defi nes a cloud service broker (CSB) as a "cloud service partner that negotiates relationships between cloud service customers and cloud service providers." 1 A cloud service partner is further explained as a "party which is engaged in support of, or auxiliary to, activities of either the cloud service provider or the cloud service customer or both." The second type of partner described in the standard is the cloud auditor. In other words, cloud brokering encompasses a wide range of activities. Essentially, it includes all intermediaries that stand between a cloud service provider (CSP) and a cloud service customer (CSC). The negotiation of relationships is most often understood as a proposition of contract that's satisfying for both customers and providers. Sustainable broker business models must create added value to ensure that CSCs have real interest in using broker services.Motivations for using broker services vary. First, using these services might be more advantageous from an economical viewpoint: CSBs might offer better conditions to customers than CSPs. On the other hand, CSBs might create new channel and marketing opportunities for CSPs, resulting in a growth of sales.A CSB might also take care of additional customer demands. For example, the data sent to the cloud might be subject to special security or compliancy regulations, such as specifi c requirements for data location, encryption, or format. A CSB could select services that fulfi ll these demands. It might also select offers compatible with the other products and services currently used by the consumer, minimizing the time and costs of transitioning to a new cloud. The CSB's selection could also be motivated by additional aspects, including the trust, reputation, environment-awareness (for example, use of green energy), or social responsibility of CSPs.

Algorithms solving the Internet shopping optimization problem with price discounts

“…To alleviate the problem and also deal with scalability we consider investigating a parallel version of the algorithm on a GPU infrastructure. Furthermore, there are some interesting similarities between ISOP and exciting Cloud Brokering [37]. Linking it with ISOP may result in the possibility of using algorithms prepared for ISOP.…”

Trustworthy Online Shopping with Price Impact

“…Continuing the analysis one can see that 19.0% of respondents need not less than a numerical rating of 7. Moreover, 16.1% declare that the sellers rating should be at least 7.5. The biggest group of respondents (exactly 26.1%) wished to see rating 8 or more.…”

“…Future work will involve deep analysis of trust factor and combine it with the optimization of the problem (also from more technical point of view [22]). Furthermore, it will be inspiring to enrich cloud brokering problem [16] with the trust factor analysis. Cloud brokering is a vibrant topic and according to our best knowledge it lacks and suffer from adequate (or even whatsoever) trust and reputation factors influence on the market.…”

BEACON: A Cloud Network Federation Framework

“…Finally, cloud brokering has been one of the most explored federation architectures, both in industry and academia. [13,6,4,14] and projects [3,5] on cloud brokering, that help cloud customers to cope with a variety of cloud interfaces, instance types, and pricing models, by providing intermediation, arbitrage, and aggregation capabilities. Regarding the networking capabilities of the above mentioned federated platforms (based on peer, hybrid, or broker architectures), most of them rely on public IP addressing to access compute instances deployed in different clouds, or use VPN tunneling mechanisms to improve security that usually are manually configured by the user.…”