Users of individual SaaS products have generally become confident that their vendor is proficient in maintaining security, ensuring that data is backed up and carrying out other support tasks. However, venturing more broadly into “the cloud,” where many applications may be used as services, is a different matter; establishing trust with numerous third-party suppliers is a complex process.The article goes on to describe some early adopters of the Vordel Cloud Service Broker. It gives an example of an organization applying control to services used in the Amazon cloud.
To help address the problem, Vordel introduced the Vordel Cloud Service Broker in November 2009. It manages multidomain cloud services by registering them in a single repository to facilitate monitoring and policy enforcement. Cloud Service Broker also optimizes performance by providing caching, acceleration and data transformation.
http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=60342&PageNum=1
It is worth contrasting the Cloud Service Broker approach with previous "SOA Governance" approaches. With "SOA Governance", an organization would apply policies to its internal services. However, a business depends on more than just its internal services. The approach of the Cloud Service Broker is to apply control to all the services which a business depends upon. So, these are not only internal services, but also services in the Cloud.