Cloud Engineering: The CIO's Dilemma

Cloud services typically deliver commodity-like capabilities, often with consumer-grade service-level agreements (SLAs), and organizations increasingly will be dealing with the inherent challenges in this business model. This will create the need for "cloud engineering." Gartner defines cloud engineering as the process of designing the systems necessary to leverage the power and economics of cloud resources to solve business problems.

As cloud services are adopted, the ability to govern their use, performance and delivery will be too complex and untrustworthy for organizations to handle their integration and consumption with only internal resources. Hence, cloud service brokerages will emerge. Gartner describes cloud service brokerages as models (including a set of activities) for conducting cloud service governance (CSG) and integration-as-a-service. These service brokers will be an evolution of today's value-added resellers (VARs), resellers, and system integrators (SIs). They will take responsibility for the overall SLA requirements of the business. They are likely to be skilled in specific industries. Particularly for small businesses, these brokerages will have deeper skills in the cloud market than your company can effectively muster/ In addition, these providers will capitalize on this rapidly developing market to get the best deal for the services they resell or integrate.