In recent years, adoption of cloud computing for computational needs is growing significantly due to various factors such as no upfront cost and access to latest service. In general, cloud infrastructure providers offer a wide range of services with different pricing models, instance types and a host of value-added features. Efficient selection of cloud services constitutes significant management challenges for cloud consumer, which is tedious and involves large information processing. To overcome this, the cloud brokers provide resource provisioning options that ease the task of choosing the best services based on consumers requirements and also provide a uniform management interface to access cloud services. This paper proposes a novel cloud brokering architecture that provides an optimal deployment plan for placement of virtual resources in multiple clouds. The objective of the deployment plan is to select the best cloud services with optimal cost, taking into account various attributes defined in service measurement index (SMI) with additional physical and logical constraints. The proposed cloud brokering architecture has been modeled using mixed integer programming formulation and Benders decomposition algorithm to solve efficiently. Efficacy of the proposed algorithm has been verified by extensive numerical studies and sensitivity analysis.Keywords Cloud broker · Infrastructure as a service · Deployment plan · Service measurement index · Mixed integer programming · Optimization