For the past 18 months, there’s been a lot of buzz in the cloud industry over the notion of “cloud brokerage.”  While the term has various meanings, it essentially describes the capability of an organization to select cloud services from different providers through a single point of entry (portal).

The concept is similar to the popular travel websites that offer consumers access to services from different airline, hotel and car rental providers and enable them to choose the best services for their travel needs.

For computing capacity needs (or, in terms of the cloud, IaaS), the belief is that not all enterprise/government workloads (servers and applications) need to run in a highly secure (and therefore costly) cloud environment.

For example, development and test workloads could use a public cloud (the lowest price point), pre-production testing could be conducted in a hybrid cloud, and production could be carried out in a private cloud (a more expensive option). Savings could be achieved by determining in advance which workloads should be run in which environments.

At the application layer, cloud brokerage promises to simplify access to SaaS-based applications from different providers. As organizations chose one provider for their CRM, another for their HR and yet another for email, cloud brokerage tools ensure similar data remains consistent and is entered only once across different providers.

Because cloud brokerage is still in the early stages of adoption, there are only a handful of enterprise success stories and use cases to learn from. Time will tell if the investment of setting up a cloud brokerage environment, establishing policies, and extending part of your organization’s security controls into different clouds is worth the savings generated.