Enabling customer self-service: It is vital to minimize your customer support costs and the best way to do this is by offering feature-rich self-service tools that give the customer visibility and control into their account to make a range of changes as needed such as changing passwords, adjusting preferences, and mobile device configuration.

Handling customer and infrastructure provisioning: Creating customer accounts and spinning up (and down) the physical and virtual resources are necessary to deliver cloud computing services.  Flexibility and balancing density with power and cooling efficiency are important infrastructure requirements.

Offering multiple subscription services: Cloud computing services are offered and delivered over the Internet and the expectation of the end customer is that they can purchase and manage these services over the Internet a la carte and bundled for discounts. Your business requires an ordering system and customer-facing storefront that is integrated with a product catalog. You must be able to define the ordering steps, product-specific data collection, and address business-specific requirements around direct order-entry and sales commissions.

Managing the back-end: There are a number of important back-end components to operating cloud computing services, such as customer accounts, servers and applications management, IP address and network management, monitoring, and security. These back-end elements have the potential to pose significant complexity if not managed by a solid SDP.

Integration with internal and external systems: Your SDP will need to hook into existing systems and platforms inside and outside of your organization. Internally, this could include CRM, ERP, helpdesk, accounting and reporting systems. Externally, you will likely need to tie into various mechanisms to support e-commerce such as payment and SSL gateways.

Billing and accounting: As noted directly above, your SDP could hook into an existing billing system. Alternatively, an SDP can have a baked-in billing system which would handle everything from invoicing, recurring credit card processing, fraud screening, and taxation issues.