Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a cloud services brokerage can help small and medium-size businesses make best use of cloud computing.

1. Cloud Services Brokerages Add Needed Elements of Trust
and Oversight to Complex Cloud Deals
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a cloud services brokerage can help small and
medium-size businesses make best use of cloud computing.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: Duncan, LLC
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're
listening to BriefingsDirect.
Our discussion today focuses on an essential aspect of helping businesses make
the best use of cloud computing.
We're examining the role and value of cloud services brokers with an emphasis
on small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), regional businesses, and
government, and looking for the best results from a specialist cloud service
Gardner
brokerage role within these different types of organizations.
Learn more about Todd D. Lyle's book,
Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerages,
at groundingthecloud.org
No two businesses have identical needs, and so specialized requirements need to be factored into
the use of often commodity-type cloud services. An intermediary brokerage can help companies
and government agencies make the best use of commodity and targeted clouds and not fall prey
to replacing an on-premises integration problem with a cloud complexity problem.
To learn more about the role and value of the specialist cloud services brokerage, we're now
joined by our panel. Please join me in welcoming Todd Lyle, President of Duncan, LLC, a cloud
services brokerage in Ohio. Welcome, Todd.
Todd D. Lyle: Well hello, Dana. It's a pleasure to be here.
Gardner: We're also here with Kevin Jackson, the Founder and CEO of GovCloud Network in
Northern Virginia. Welcome, Kevin.
Kevin L. Jackson: Thank you very much. Looking forward to the discussion.
Gardner: Let’s start with you, Todd. Tell me little bit about why there's a difference between the
good part of cloud, which is a commodity set of services, a utility approach to computing, and

2. the gulf between a company's culture of IT acquisition in the past and what they are going to
expect? How do we get regular companies to start using new cloud services?
Lyle: Through education. That’s our first step. The technology is clearly here, the three of us will
agree. It's been here for quite some time now. The beauty of it is that we're able
to extract bits and pieces for bundles, much like you get from your cell phone or
your cable TV folks. You can pull those together through a cloud services
brokerage.
So brokerage firms will go out and deal with the cloud services providers like
Amazon, Rackspace, Dell, and those types of organizations. They bring the
strengths of each of those organizations together and bundle them. Then, the
consumer gets that on a monthly basis. It's non-CAPEX, meaning there is no
Lyle
capital expenditure.
You're renting these services. So you can expand and contract as necessary. To liken this to a
utility environment, utility organizations that do electric and do power, you flip the switch on or
turn the faucet on and off. It’s a metered service.
That's where you're going to get the largest return on your collective investment when you switch
from a traditional IT environment on premises, or even a private cloud, to the public cloud and
utility that this brings.
Government agencies
Gardner: Kevin you're involved more with government agencies. They've been using IT for
an awfully long time. How is the adjustment to cloud for them? Is it easier, is it better, or is it just
a different type of approach and therefore requires adjustment?
Jackson: Thank you for bringing that up. Yes, I've been focused on providing advanced IT to the
federal market and Fortune 500 businesses for quite a while. The advent of cloud
computing and cloud services brokerages is a double-edged sword. At once, it
provides a much greater agility with respect to the ability to leverage information
technology.
But, at the same time, it brings a much greater amount of responsibility, because
cloud service providers have a broad range of capabilities. That broad range has
to be matched against the range of requirements within an enterprise, and that
drives a change in the management style of IT professionals. You're going more
Jackson
from your implementation skills to a management of IT skills. This is a great transition across IT,
and is something that cloud services brokerages can really aid.
Gardner: Todd, it sounds as if we're moving this from an implementation and a technology skill
set into more of a procurement, governance, contracts, and creating the right service-level

3. agreements (SLAs). These are, I think, new skills for many businesses. How is that coaching
aspect of a cloud service’s brokerage coming out in the market? Is that something you are seeing
a lot of demand for?
Lyle: It’s customer service, plain and simple, and we hear about it all the time, but we also pass it
off all the time. You have to be accessible. If you're a 69-year-old business owner and embracing
a technology from your demographic, it’s going to be different than if you are 23 years old in the
approach that you take to that person
As we all get more tenured, we'll see more adaptability to new technologies in a workplace, but
that’s a while out. That's the 35 and younger crowd. If you go to 35 and above, it's what Kevin
mentioned -- changing the culture, changing the way things are procured within those cultures,
and also centralizing command. That’s where the brokerage or the exchange comes into place for
this. Did I answer your question?
Gardner: Yes. One of the things that’s interesting to me is that a lot of companies are now
looking at this as not just as a way of switching from one type of IT, say a server under a desk, to
another type of IT, a server in a cloud.
It’s forcing companies to reevaluate how they do business and think of themselves as a process-management
function, regardless of where the services reside. This also requires more than just
how to write a contract. It's really how to do business transformation at a certain level.
Does that play into the cloud services brokerage? Do you find yourselves coaching companies on
business management?
Jackson: Absolutely. One of the things cloud services is bringing to the forefront is the rapidity
of change. We're going from an environment where organizations expect a homogenous IT
platform to where hybrid IT is really the norm. Change management is a key aspect of being able
to have an organization take on change as a normal aspect of their business.
This is also driving business models. The more effective business models today are taking
advantage of the parallel and global nature of cloud computing. This requires experience, and
cloud services brokerages have the experience of dealing with different providers, different
technologies, and different business models. This is where they provide a tremendous amount of
value.
Different types of services
Gardner: Todd, this notion of being a change agent also raises the notion that we're not just
talking about one type of cloud service. We're talking about software as a service (SaaS),
bringing communications applications like e-mail and calendar into a web or mobile
environment. We're talking about platform as a service (PaaS), if you're doing development.

4. We're talking about even some analytics nowadays, as people try to think about how to use big
data and business intelligence (BI) in the cloud.
Tell me a bit more about why being a change agent across these different models and not just a
cloud implementor or integrator raises the value of this cloud service brokerage role?
Lyle: It’s a holistic approach. I've been talking to my team lately about being the Dale Carnegie
of the cloud hence the specialist cloud services brokerage because it really does come down to
personalities.
In a book that I've recently written called ‘Grounding the Cloud, Basics and Brokerages,’ I talk
about the human element. That's the personalities, expectations, and abilities of your workforce,
not only your present workforce but your future workforce, which we discussed just a moment
ago, as far as demographics were concerned.
It's constant change. Kevin said it, using a different term, but that's the world we live in. Some
schools are doing this, where they're adding this to their MBA program. It is a common set of
skills that you must have and it's managing personalities more than you're managing technology
in my opinion.
Gardner: Tell me a bit more about this book, Todd, it’s called ‘Grounding the Cloud.' When is it
available and how can people learn more about it?
Lyle: It’s available now on Amazon, and they can find out at www.groundingthecloud.org. This
is a layman’s introduction to cloud computing and it helps business men and women get a better
understanding of the cloud and how they could best maximize their time and their money, as it
associates to their IT needs.
Gardner: Does the book get into this concept of the specialist cloud services brokerage, as
opposed to just a general brokerage, and what is the difference?
Lyle: That’s an excellent question, Dana. There are a lot of perceptions, you have one as well, of
what a cloud services brokerage is. But, at the end of the day, and we've been talking about this
in the entire discussion, it's about the human element, our personalities, and how to make these
changes so that the companies actually can speed up.
We discuss it here in the "flyover country," in Ohio. We meet with Cleveland State University.
We meet with Allen Black Enterprises, and then with a small landscaping company to
demonstrate how the cloud is being applied from 6 and 7 users, all the way up to 25,000 users.
And we're doing it here, where things tend to take a couple of years to change, and that’s what’s
happening.

5. User advocate
Gardner: How is a cloud services brokerage different from a systems integrator? It seems as if
there's some commonality. But it almost seems like you are not just channeled, that you are really
as much an advocate for the user, and not so much an advocate for the vendor, or do I have that
wrong?
Lyle: A specialist cloud services brokerage is going to be more like Underwriters Laboratories
(UL). It’s going to go out, field all the different flavors that are available, pick what they feel is
best, and bring it together in a bundle. Then, it works with the entity to adapt to the culture and
the change that's going to have to occur and the education within their particular businesses, as
opposed to a very high-level vertical, where some things are just pushed out at an enterprise
level.
Jackson: I see this cloud services brokerage and specialist cloud services brokerage as the new-age
system integrator, because there are additional capabilities that are offered.
For example, you need a trusted third-party to monitor and report on adherence to SLAs. The
provider is not going to do that. That’s a role for your cloud services brokerage. Also you need to
maintain viable options for alternative cloud-service providers. The cloud services brokerage will
identify your options and give you choices, should you need the change. A specialist cloud
services brokerage also helps to ensure portability of your business process and data from one
cloud service provider to another.
Management of change is more than a single aspect within the organization. It’s how to adapt
with constant change and make sure that your enterprise has options and doesn't get locked into a
single vendor.
Lyle: It comes to the point, Kevin, of building for constant change. You're exactly right.
Gardner: You raise an interesting point too, Kevin, that you shouldn’t get lulled into thinking
that we'll just make a move to the cloud, and it will all be done. This is going to be a constant set
of moves, a journey, and you're going to want to avail yourself of the marketplace that’s
emerging.
We're seeing prices driven down. We're seeing competition among commodity-level cloud
services. I expect we'll see other kinds of market forces at work. You want to be agile and be able
to take advantage of that in your total cost of computing. Actually, I think that's going to take
quite a dip over the next several years because of that.
Jackson: There's a broad range of providers in the marketplace, and that range expands daily.
Similarly, there's a large range of requirements within any enterprise of any size. Brokers act as
matchmakers, avoiding common mistakes, and also help the organizations, the SMBs in
particular, implement best practices in their adoption of this new model.

6. Gardner: Also, when you’ve got a brokerage as your advocate, they're keeping their eye on the
cloud marketplace, so that you can keep your eye on your business and your vertical. Therefore,
you're going to need somebody to tip you off when things change and be on the vanguard of that.
Is that something that comes up in your book, Todd, of the public service brokerage being an
educated expert in a field where the business really wants to stick to its knitting?
Primary goal
Lyle: Absolutely. That’s the primary goal, both at a strategic level, when you're deciding what
products to use -- the Rackspaces, the Microsofts, the RightSignatures, etc. -- all the way down
to the tactical one of the daily operation. When I leave the company, how soon can we lock Todd
out? How soon can we lock him down or lock him out? It becomes a security issue at a very
granular level. Because it's metered, you turn it off, you turn Todd off, you save his data, and put
it someplace else.
That’s a role that, requires command and control and oversight, and that's a responsibility. You're
part butler. You're looking out for the day-to-day, the minute issues. Then you get up to a very
high level. You're like UL. You're keeping an eye on everything that’s occurring. UL comes to
mind because they do things that are tactile and those things that you can't touch, and definitely
the cloud is something you can’t touch.
Jackson: Actually, I believe it represents the embracing of a cooperative model of my consumers
of this information technology, but embracing with open eyes. This is particularly of interest
within the federal marketplace, because federal procurement executives have to stop their
adversarial attitude towards industry. Cloud services brokerages and specialist cloud services
brokerages sit at the same the table with these consumers.
Learn more about Todd D. Lyle's book,
Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerages,
at groundingthecloud.org
Lyle: Kevin, your point is very well taken. I'll go one step further. We were talking up and down
the scales, strategic down to the daily operations. One of the challenges that we have to
overcome is the signatories, the senior executives, that make these decisions. They're in a
different age group and they're used to doing things a certain way.
That being said, getting legislation to be changed at the federal level, directives being pushed
down, will make the difference, because they do know how to take orders. I know I'm speaking
frankly, but what's going to have to occur for us to see some significant change within the next
five years is being told how the procurement process is going to happen.

7. You're taking the feather; I'm taking the stick, but it’s going to take both of those to accomplish
that task at the federal level.
Gardner: We know that Duncan, LLC is a specialized cloud services brokerage. Kevin, tell us a
little bit about the GovCloud Network. What is your organization, and how do you align with
cloud brokerage?
Jackson: GovCloud Network is a specialty consultancy that helps organizations modify or
change their mission and business processes in order to take advantage of this new style of
system integrator.
Earlier, I said that the key to transition in a cloud is adopting and adapting to the parallel nature
and a global nature of cloud computing. This requires a second look at your existing business
processes and your existing mission processes to do things in different ways. That's what
GovCloud Network allows. It helps you redesign your business and mission processes for this
constant change and this new model.
Notion of governance
Gardner: I'd like to go back to this notion of governance. It seems to me, Todd, that when you
have different parts of your company procuring cloud services, sometimes this is referred to as
shadow IT. They're not doing it in concert, through a gatekeeper like a cloud broker. Not only is
there a potential redundancy of efforts in labor and work in process, but there is this governance
and security risk, because one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing.
Let's address this issue about better security from better governance by having a common
brokerage gatekeeper, rather than having different aspects of your company out buying and using
cloud services independently, without that unifying factor of how to create the right governance
policies and management?
Lyle: We're your trusted adviser. We’re also very much a trusted member of your team when you
bring us into the fold. We provide oversight. We're big brother, if you want to look at it that way,
but big brother is important when you are dealing with your business and your business
resources. You don’t want to leave a window open at night. You certainly don't want to leave
your network open.
There's a lot going on in today's world, a lot of transition, the NSA and everything we worry
about. It's important to have somebody providing command and control. We don’t sit there and
stare at a monitor all day. We use systems that watch this, but we can tell when there's an
increase or decrease out of the norm of activities within your organization
It really doesn't matter how big or how small, there are systems that allow us to monitor this and
give a heads up. If you're part of a leadership team, you’d be notified that again Todd Lyle has

8. left an open window. But if you don't know that Todd even has the window, then that’s even a
bigger concern. That comes down to the leadership again -- how you want to manage your entity.
We all want to feel free to make decisions, but there are too many benefits available to us,
transparent benefits, as Kevin put it, to using the cloud and hiding in plain sight, maximizing e-mail
at 100,000 plus users. Those are all good things but they require oversight.
It's almost like an aviation model, where you have your ground control and your flight crew.
Everybody on that team is providing oversight to the other. Ultimately, you have your control
tower that's watching that, and the control tower, both in the air and on the ground, is your cloud
services brokerage.
Jackson: It’s important to understand that cloud computing is the industrialization of
information technology. You're going from an age where the IT infrastructure is a hand-designed
and built work of art to where your IT infrastructure is a highly automated assembly-line
platform that requires real-time monitoring and metering. Your specialist cloud services
brokerage actually helps you in that transition and operations within this highly automated
environment.
Lyle: Well said, Kevin.
Gardner: We've talked about this a little bit in the abstract, and it's made a tremendous amount
of sense to me. A powerful way to cement understanding is to show examples and understand
what others have gone through.
I’d like to start with you, Todd. You did mention that you have some examples in your book. I’d
like to hear in more detail about when someone has used a specialized cloud brokerage attuned to
their business, their industry, or their vertical. What do they get for it and how has it worked out
for them? Can you run us through a use case of where this works well?
Three narratives
Lyle: Okay, in my book, we have three narratives, as I mentioned earlier. I talk about
Cleveland State University (CSU) and education because this is what this whole program is
about, education. It's not offensive -- it's not business, it's not government, it’s education.
With technology, there are so many options out there today as we’re discussing. It's so exciting,
but we have to get Iris to change her way of thinking.
A couple of things occurred at CSU, cementing my theory on demographics and change in
speaking computing as a first language. CSU switched to Microsoft 365 from onsite Lotus Notes,
and for anybody who's been on Lotus Notes, it's always been a challenge to use. To get to 365,
some education had to occur, and some heads-up had to occur.

9. People need to be involved in the process at some point, and others excluded for business
reasons, and I don't mean that a bad way. I mentioned Iris, because Iris was a lady who works on
the third floor of Rhodes Tower at Cleveland State and was very unhappy about losing her
desktop printer.
They went from 2,100 printers down to 300 with the help of not only Bill Wilson and the IT
team, but Xerox. Xerox was able to bring tremendous savings at the granular level, but it took a
great deal of education and patience, because Iris wasn't happy about losing her printer. She
wanted to know why Bill Wilson wasn’t going to lose his.
It really discusses it at a very personal level, because we can all relate to printers and ancillary
equipment and our way of doing business. It discusses again, on the great Lake Erie, how change
has occurred and how they were able to address it from a human element perspective, again, Iris.
What we do as a specialist cloud services brokerage is the human element side of this, making
sure that people are included in the process, being educated, giving access to communication and
then being available when the time comes. Make sure you answer that phone for the person who
needs someone on the phone and make sure that you have the Wiki available and up to date for
the person who is going to reach out to that Wiki
Gardner: Kevin, any examples from your vantage point on the role of the cloud services
brokerage and some concrete ways that it’s helped a specific organization?
Jackson: Absolutely. About three years ago I responded to a requirement from the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), where they were having issues working with allies with
respect to exchange of geospatial information and data. Everyone had their maps and everyone
had their own system for distributing and sharing that, but they didn't work together. The NGA
wanted to have a more effective and efficient means for exchanging geospatial information.
So they reached out to the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) to see if
this industry organization had any good ideas for addressing this mission-critical requirement. I
was serving as the head of the cloud-computing working group, and the team came up with an
idea of using cloud as an inner-space in order to translate different types and formats of
geospatial information and data amongst the participants.
Brokered platform
We did this by use of a brokered cloud platform that came to be known as the Geospatial
Community Cloud. The cloud services brokerage acted as an intermediary to allow for a real-time
change or identification of capabilities for geospatial interoperability. It's a very successful
demonstration.
The Recovery, Accountability, and Transparency Board also leveraged a cloud services
brokerage paradigm when they were required to stand up very quickly to manage their hundreds

10. of billions of dollars during the financial crisis. The CIO there, Shawn Kingsberry, knew that he
wouldn't be able to respond to the requirements of monitoring, metering, and managing these
large sums of money without an IT infrastructure.
Instead of taking the traditional acquisition process within the Federal Government, which would
take years, he instead became a cloud services brokerage for his own agency and adopted
multiple cloud services. This also was a very successful implementation. So even the Federal
Government can adopt cloud services brokerage and respond in a very quick and efficient and
effective manner.
Gardner: Todd, we spoke earlier about how we're moving from implementation to procurement.
We've also talked about governance being important, SLAs, and managing a contract across
variety of different organizations that are providing cloud type services. It seems to me that we're
talking about financial types of relations.
How does the cloud services brokerage help the financial people in a company. Maybe it's an
individual who wears many hats, but you could think of them as akin to a chief financial officer,
even though that might not be their title?
What is it that we are doing with the cloud services brokerage that is of a special interest and
value to the financial people? Is it unified billing or is it one throat to choke? How does that
work?
Lyle: Both, and then some. Ultimately it's unified billing and unified management from daily
operations. It's helping people understand that we're moving from a capitalized expense, the
server, the software, things that are tactile that we are used to touching. We're used to being able
to count them and we like to see our stuff.
So it's transitioning and letting go, especially for the people who watch the money. We have a
fiduciary responsibility to the organizations that we work for. Part of that is communicating,
educating, and helping the CFO-type person understand the transition not only from the CAPEX
to the OPEX, because they get that, but also how you're going to correlate it to productivity.
It's letting them know to be patient. It's going to take a couple months for your metering to level
up. We have some statistics and we can read into that. It's holding their hand, helping them out.
That's a very big deal as far as that's concerned.
Gardner: Let's start to think about how to get started. Obviously, every company is different.
They're going to be at a different place in terms of maturity, in their own IT, never mind the
transition to cloud types of activities. Would you recommend the book as a starting point? Do
you have some other materials or references? How do you help that education process get going.
I'm thinking about organizations that are really at the very beginning?
Gateway cloud

11. Lyle: We've created a gateway cloud in our book, not to confuse the cloud story. Ultimately, we
have to take in consideration our economy, the world economy today. We're still very slow to
move forward.
There are some activities occurring that are forcing us to make change. Our contracts may be
running out. Software like XP is no longer supported. So we may be forced into making a
change. That's when it's time to engage a cloud services brokerage or a specialist cloud services
brokerage.
Go out and buy the book. It's available on Amazon. It gives you a breakdown, and you can do an
assessment of your organization as it currently is and it will help you map your network. Then, it
will help you reach out to a cloud services brokerage, if you are so inclined, through points of
interest for request for proposal or request for information.
The fun part is, it gives you a recipe using Rackspace, Jungle Disk, and gotomeeting.com,where
you get to build a baby cloud. Then, you can go out and play with it.
You want to begin with three points: file sharing, remote access, and email. You can be the
lighthouse or you can be a dry-cleaners, but every organization needs file sharing, remote access,
and email. We open-sourced this recipe or what we call the industrial bundle for small
businesses.
It's not daunting. We’ve got some time yet, but I would encourage you to get a handle on where
your infrastructure is today, digest that information, go out and play with the gateway cloud that
we've created, and reach out to us if you are so inclined.
We’d love for you to use one of our organizations, but ultimately know that there are people out
there to help you. This book was written for us, not for the technical person. It is not in geek
speak. This is written for the layperson. I've been told it’s entertaining, which is the most
important part, because you’re going to read it then.
Jackson: I would urge SMBs to take the plunge. Cloud can be scary to some, but there is very
little risk and there is much to gain for any SMB. The using, leveraging, taking advantage of the
cloud gateway that Todd mentioned is a very good, low risk, and high reward path towards the
cloud.
Gardner: I would agree with both of what you all said. The notion of a proof of concept and
dipping your toe in. You don't have to buy it all at once, but find an area of your company where
you’re going to be forced to make a change anyway and then to your point, Kevin, do it now.
Take the plunge earlier rather than later.
Jackson: Before you're forced.

12. Large changes
Gardner: Before you’re forced, but you want to look at a tactical benefit and where to work
towards strategic benefit, but there is going to be some really large changes happening in what
these cloud providers can do in a fairly short amount of time.
We're moving from discrete apps into the entire desktop, so a full PC experience as a service.
That’s going to be very attractive to people. They're going to need to make some changes to get
there. But rather than thinking about services discreetly, more and more of what they're looking
for is going to be coming as the entire desktop experience and more analytics capabilities mixed
into that. So I am glad to hear you both thinking how to do it, managed at a proof-of-concept
level, but I would say do it sooner rather than later.
We're about out of time. I'm afraid we have to leave it there. You've been listening to a sponsored
BriefingsDirect discussion on helping businesses make the best use of cloud computing, and
we've seen how the role and value of a cloud services brokerage brokerage with an emphasis
across the different types of businesses, whether it's small to medium, regional, government,
specializing with a brokerage that's attuned to your area, this makes a tremendous amount of
sense.
This is going to help companies and government agencies make the best use of the commodity
and targeted-cloud services, but not fall prey to replacing on-premises integration problems with
a cloud complexity and management problem.
So a huge thank you to our guests. We've been here with Todd Lyle, the President of Duncan,
LLC, a cloud services brokerage in Ohio. Thank you Todd.
Lyle: You're welcome. Thanks for having me, Dana.
Learn more about Todd D. Lyle's book,
Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerages,
at groundingthecloud.org
Gardner: And thanks also to Kevin Jackson, the Founder and CEO of GovCloud Network in
Northern Virginia. Thanks, Kevin.
Jackson: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.
Gardner: And also a huge thank you to our audience for joining. This is Dana Gardner, Principal
Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks again for being with us, and don't forget to come back
next time.

13. Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: Duncan, LLC
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a cloud services brokerage can help small and
medium-size businesses make best use of cloud computing. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2014. All rights reserved.
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