Virtual cloud bank: An architectural approach for intermediating cloud services

With the recent advent of the cloud computing paradigm, the concept of a cloud service broker (CSB) is rapidly emerging. The general role of the CSB is to intermediate cloud services. However, to adopt and realize this concept, we need to identify the primary stakeholders, define key requirements, and define the overall structure of the CSB. It is these architectural concerns on which the present paper is focused. We propose a CSB we refer to as the virtual cloud bank (VCB). It intermediates tenant-centric cloud services that fulfill the requirements of tenants. We also define the stakeholders, their requirements, and the architecture of VCB. VCB is proposed in part for wider use as an architectural template and base model for the realization and adoption of CSBs within a cloud computing paradigm.