Federated cloud service broker (FCSB): An advanced cloud service intermediator for public administrations

A cloud services brokerage is third-party software that adds value to cloud services on behalf of cloud service consumers. Their goal is to make the services more specific to a company, or to integrate or aggregate services, to enhance their security, or to do anything which adds a significant layer of value (i.e. capabilities) to the original cloud services being offered (Plummer, 2012). There exist several solutions focused on providing service brokerage of Cloud Service Providers (CSP), mainly VM's and virtualized resources, but not of other services offered (e.g. Data Processing as a Service) or SaaS applications which are certified and legally compliant. This paper proposes a solution for a Federated Cloud Service Broker (FCSB) overcoming existing challenges in the public sector such as Governance, Interoperability and portability, SLAs compliance and assessment, Intelligent discovery of cloud services, cross border interoperability and legislation awareness . The analysis of the existing solutions, and the presentation of the approach made in (Alonso, et al., 2016) is complemented with a technical design including the main functionalities and the modules that will implement them.