As Cloud Arrives On Main Street, We Need A New Set Of Metrics For Cloud SLAs

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Sharon Wagner.

A lot can happen in a year, and in the world of cloud computing, 2014 was a breakout one. Cloud adoption finally experienced a tornado of demand that swept up large enterprises en masse. Yet as businesses move services to the cloud and increasingly depend on third-party vendors, important questions should be answered around who is responsible for managing these services and how service quality should be measured.

The main objective of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is to clearly define relationships and set expectations for adequate service levels between the buyer and the seller. In the case of the cloud, this would be the cloud provider and the cloud consumer. A traditional SLA is a rigid and custom contract with complicated legalese focused around operational metrics provided by IT and using IT internal resources…


A cloud SLA is a different animal mainly because cloud customers leverage the cloud as an extension of their internal IT: They don’t own the infrastructure, they don’t maintain it, and they can’t control its provisioning or maintenance procedures. The cloud’s shared responsibility model splits the responsibility between the cloud provider and the cloud customer: The customer is responsible for the application SLA and the provider is responsible for the infrastructure SLA…

Read more from the source @ http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/24/as-cloud-arrives-on-main-street-we-need-a-new-set-of-metrics-for-cloud-slas/