As a nation, we have become accustomed to having brokerage houses manage stocks and bonds, trade and transfer home mortgages, and negotiate insurance plans for large groups of employees. The consumers and businesses of this country, however, are also adjusting to a new kind of brokerage: cloud services brokerage. This phrase refers to the management of data that can be digitally stored. In a world where both consumers and customers become increasingly dependent upon technology it should come as no surprise that we have so much data that it must be stored and managed by increasingly larger cloud services brokerage firms.
While the largest banks and governments have long understood the need for contracted services to manage the data that runs everything from our national power grids to our airline travel and finance records, even smaller businesses are now embracing the need for data storage and all that those services entail.
Did you know, for example, that the latest research indicates that 35% of informational technology (IT) services are delivered in part by cloud brokerage services. In many instances, these IT service are completely dependent upon the cloud. In a generation who had to adjust to the world wide web and understand the implications and opportunities of an unknown and unseen entity providing us with the data that we need, we now must also adjust to letting the unknown and unseen cloud store our data. Everything from our bank statements to our grocery purchases, our car loans to our energy that we need to heat and cool our homes.
Cloud consultants are those people who develop and maintain data storage centers that are capable of running 24/7. For these facilities, fault tolerant is an understatement. Consider the following statistics about the nation’s reliance on cloud service brokerage firms:
- 60% of companies indicate that they use the public cloud.
- 57% of companies indicate that they use the private cloud.
- 19% of companies indicate that they use hybrid cloud services, a combination of both public and private.
- 52% of organizations indicate that they have updated their existing cloud services or plan to in the next 12 months.
- 80% of organizations indicate that they have created, or plan to create, a governance policy for their cloud use services.
- 59% of businesses indicate that they use cloud services to share data across applications.
With the global market for cloud equipment predicted to reach $79.1 billion by the year 2018, cloud brokerage services will continue to grow in their importance.
