Introducing Policy-Driven Governance and Service Level Failure Mitigation in Cloud Service Brokers: Challenges Ahead

Cloud service brokerage represents a novel operational model in the scope of cloud computing. A cloud broker acts as an intermediary between a service provider and a service consumer with the goal of adding as much value as possible to the service being provisioned and consumed. Continuous quality assurance is a type of brokerage capability having high value to both providers and consumers of cloud services. At the same time, it can be among the most challenging kinds of capability for cloud service brokers to realise. In this paper we focus on two specific themes within this scope. We present a motivating scenario and outline key research challenges associated with introducing policy-driven governance and service level failure mitigation capabilities in brokers .