Cloud Computing

Topic The top 5 details that should be included in your cloud SLA.

Read and respond to below two student’s discussions. (5-6 lines would be more sufficient) reflecting on your own experience, challenging assumptions, pointing out something new you learned, offering suggestions

#1.Posted by Krishnaveni

A service-level agreement (SLA) defines the level of service expected by a customer from a supplier, laying out the metrics by which that service is measured, and the remedies or penalties, if any, should the agreed-on service levels not be achieved. Usually, SLAs are between companies and external suppliers, but they may also be between two departments within a company. In my point of view below are five key things we need to consider.

Disaster recovery and backup

In the event of a disaster, our cloud provider should have a plan in place to prevent total loss of our data. Cloud providers should have a section of the SLA that describes their disaster recovery and backup solutions in detail. Depending on the provider, they may provide automatic backups and snapshots of our data. If the user is required to set up backup and recovery systems, the SLA should outline that. It may not specifically state how to activate them, but we should be aware if we need to activate them or not.

Data source.

“Where is the information coming from that will be used to measure the provider’s compliance?” In many situations, a customer may have to rely on the cloud provider to provide the information; however, increasingly, there are third parties that can help the customer with this. In a perfect world, the data should be auditable by the customer to verify the data’s accuracy, reliability and validity.

Acceptable performance.

This item specifies the minimum level of service that must be provided, and it answers the question, “What do we want from the provider for this particular service?” It flows from and is directly related to the customer’s objectives under the contract. In the cloud, many SLAs are expressed in terms of availability. For example, a SaaS provider may commit to an application availability of 99.5%.

Scalability

Many SLAs are designed to meet the needs of the customer at the time of signing, but we all know organizations can change dramatically in size over time. Make sure the SLA details intervals for reviewing a contract so that if our organization grows larger, our cloud capacity can grow with it (and if our organization happens to grow smaller, we’ll want the option to reduce capacity; no sense it paying for unused capacity).

Customer responsibilities

The SLA is a contract that outlines responsibilities that both the provider and customer agree to. Our cloud provider needs to inform us of what we’re liable for when we enter the agreement. It could be its own section or sprinkled throughout the agreement, but it must tell us what’s expected of us. Make sure we mull over the entirety of the SLA to know what our provider will manage and what we need to as a customer.

Finally, the Service Level Agreement should define the process for requesting a service credit. Unless a cloud service suffers a massive, public outage, it’s unusual for a vendor to automatically grant a service credit in response to an SLA violation. We’re going to have to ask for service credits, and the SLA should tell us how. In particular, the SLA should spell out the acceptable methods for invoking service credits, as well as the acceptable window of time for making a request.

 

#2. Posted by Premchand

Service Level Agreements(SLA) are increasingly incorporated within the cloud computing service delivery as a way of ensuring that the service providers deliver quality and dedicated services. SLA provide a description of the service delivered as well as detailed managerial perspective of service delivery. For this reason, one of the five details that should be incorporated within the cloud SLA could include the agreement overview, which should describe the kind of contracting used between the cloud computing supplier and the customer. “An agreement overview should details key information such as the expiry date of SLA, a general statement of the contract, parties involved and any other information related to effective functioning of SLA” (Joshi & Pearce, 2015).

SLA main purpose is to ensure service delivery to customers, which means a description of service agreement must be incorporated in SLA. “Service agreement described in an SLA should highlight the scope of services delivered, key customer requirements, the service provider requirements as well as key service assumptions” (Mirobi & Arockiam, 2015). A description of services offered by the service providers should highlight the needs of the customers as well as the needs of the supplier. Mutual acceptance of the terms and conditions used in the service delivery should further highlight the service agreement attribute of SLA. Notably, a service agreement should describe the components of services delivered by a service provider, when the customer is contracting the supplier for specific services.

Service management should constitute of another component that should be present in a cloud SLA. Service management describes the method and the approach that should be used by the supplier in ensuring service delivery. “Service availability and service request are covered within the service management aspect, as they detail how services could be provided to the customers” (Manuel, 2015). Support services, time of response, remote assistance amongst other services should be incorporated within the service management attribute of cloud SLA.  When creating the service level agreement, suppliers are always anticipating an improved working relationship with their customers.

Goals, objectives and stakeholders’ needs and expectations should further be part of a cloud SLA. Specific goals and objectives should guide the implementation and execution process of an SLA. The purpose of the agreement should be highlighted when defining the goals and objectives of the cloud SLA (Joshi & Pearce, 2015). Stakeholders defined within the SLA contract should be clearly defined, while highlighting the key needs and expectations of these stakeholders. The cloud computing service providers and the customers are part of the stakeholders involved in a cloud SLA.

Periodic review of the cloud SLA could be a vital component when doing the overall integration of this contract. Periodic review should highlight performance standards, and various response time and strategies. Specific timelines should be set for the specified periodic review to increase the performance and effectiveness of the cloud SLA (Manuel, 2015). The integration of all these components within the cloud SLA should ensure effective delivery of services as per the specification of both the service provider and the customer.