Many enterprises are adopting hybrid cloud to accelerate innovation and to create new business models and revenue streams. They are modernizing their existing IT environment and taking advantage of newer, cost-efficient consumption models. However, as they adopt a hybrid cloud, they become increasingly aware of their reliance on multiple providers, and they struggle to maintain consistent management across the cloud and traditional IT platforms.

At the same time, line of business (LOB) executives and users are aggressively pursuing cloud computing solutions (from a variety of suppliers), resulting in inefficiencies, risk to the business, and loss of insight across the organization, potentially affecting business results. Also, these renegade cloud environments introduce financial and security risks and additional complexity into the business.

IBM® Cloud Brokerage (formally known as IBM cloudMatrix) is a cloud brokerage software as a service (SaaS) that enables your business to plan, buy, and manage cloud services using a single dashboard. This solution provides your business with the ability to make better informed decisions when moving to a hybrid cloud environment. With it you can plan, provision, and manage IT resources across multiple cloud and traditional IT models. Cloud Brokerage gives you greater visibility and control of your overall IT environment, enabling you and your IT team to effectively manage costs and compliance.

This IBM Redguide™ publication introduces Cloud Brokerage and highlights the business value of the solution. It provides a high-level architecture, identifies key components of the architecture, and discusses the hybrid cloud implementation framework, which includes other IBM product offerings. The guide describes example scenarios that use Cloud Brokerage to resolve common business problems.