Presentation: Tweet"Leveraging Cloud Brokers to optimize your cloud architecture's cost structure and extend your provider choice"

Financial optimisation of cloud computing procurement is highly relevant to a Cloud Architect because it increases the choice of cloud providers that meet financial selection criteria, allowing technical performance to determine the choice of cloud. In a world where the balance between cost and performance is always controversial, the cloud architect who can access extra resources for the same cost, with pricing certainty, is able to deliver the preferred solution to management and to clients. Many cloud providers offer discounted pricing if you pay on terms that suit them, for example, with an upfront payment using a credit card. Try getting that past your finance team, however! You'll likely find they prefer to pay for services after consumption and according to their own unique procurement practices that definitely don't involve credit cards, either personal or corporate. A Cloud Broker-Dealer allows you to overcome this challenge by offering a happy medium, buying from cloud providers on terms to suit the providers, and invoicing cloud users on terms that suit the cloud users' finance team, without interfering with the technical delivery of the cloud to the cloud architect. This talk will explain how the Broker-Dealer model which is common in commodities markets, such as electricity futures trading is readily applicable to cloud computing without any technical impact, including some real-life case studies.