Ten key principles for evaluating cloud computing SLAs

"To be in danger" is not just a Boy Scout motto; This should also be something that we need to be realistic and always follow in any cloud computing vendor's assessment and selection process. After a preliminary and verbatim review of your Business cloud service level agreement (SLA) requirements, it is time to sit down and evaluate the cloud computing SLA in front of you.

Since cloud computing is still a buyer's need to be cautious, corporate users can use SLAs to ensure the performance and availability of the services they use. If you are prepared and have studied all possible risks, make sure that there are clear and detailed provisions in the SLA documentation that correspond to appropriate protection measures. Use the following ten principles to guide your enterprise in cloud computing SLA assessment.

1. Keep the SLA provision simple and concise. Avoid being bogged down in excessive detail. Focus on the company's business priorities and the indicators for managing positive business outcomes, not technical parameters. Target what is most important to business goals, not what the cloud-computing SLA provides for a typical consumption.

Identify potential vulnerabilities and determine whether future vendors will allow negotiations to fill the gaps. At the same time, it is necessary to clarify their responsibilities for specificity. For example, the traditional cloud-computing vendor's liability is limited to direct losses and the maximum amount of compensation is set according to all the terms in the agreement. You should seriously consider whether these terms are good for your company.

2. Consider unique business needs. Since most vendors trade with customers and services through multiple tenants and resource sharing, their SLA considerations are broader and tend to be tailored to the general public rather than to your particular business. As a result, related specific needs become more difficult to meet. You need to understand how a cloud computing provider handles a one-time customer demand.

3. Consider SLAs and quality of service. It is important to differentiate between the specifications of cloud services, the availability of services, and the quality of services. For example, boilerplate protocols ensure a certain level of service availability rather than quality of service.

Multi-tenant and peak load pattern changes unexpectedly reduce cloud computing services. The result is that, while the service availability requirements of an SLA may be met, the quality of service is not met. In the event of a real-time cloud-computing demand, this will result in inconsistent service performance for both internal IT users and users accessing cloud-burst capacity, or worse, for end users. The quality of service will have an impact directly on productivity or business output.

4. Remember to do disaster recovery plan. How will data access be affected if there are disaster events on the local Web site or on the IT site of the vendor? It is particularly important to articulate this hybrid cloud environment in your cloud computing SLAs, and it is time to elaborate on business processes or data integration dependencies between internal IT departments and public cloud computing.

It is also important to consider the consistency between the two cloud computing: Does your cloud-computing SLA match the internal recovery point and recovery time goal? is the data locked in the vendor's environment? Is there a cloud computing data retrieval mechanism for disaster recovery (DR) or migration to another vendor or internal IT infrastructure?

5. Find the relevant special costs and costs. Companies with large historical legacy data need to migrate these large amounts of data to cloud computing before they are formally used, and some have few digital assets. Since migrating data to cloud computing takes time and money, having fewer digital assets makes cloud computing resources easier to implement. Corporate users need to assess whether there is such a data transmission mechanism applicable to their business responsibilities and security objectives.

6. Do not forget to save data. It is necessary to retain the necessary data or to delete certain data altogether after a certain period of time, in accordance with specified requirements or business requirements. Customers need to obtain audit reports for special data access so that any information that needs to be completely removed is stored internally rather than in the cloud.

7. Establish an not-injected SLA. In a hybrid cloud computing setting, an internal or private cloud computing SLA has the risk of flooding after the introduction of a hybrid cloud computing service, unless the business functions that are operating within the business function are mutually exclusive. If you use more than one cloud computing provider, you should assess the SLA's terms that could weaken any aspect of the relevant internal SLAs or other vendor cloud computing SLAs.

8. Seek support from third parties. If private cloud computing involves third parties or if cloud computing service providers rely on third parties to deliver their services, it is important to assess potential vulnerabilities and clarify responsibility and ownership issues, especially in cases of violations and conflicts. The SLAs of some cloud services providers, though beautifully printed, limit the responsibility for the infrastructure and services they have.

9. Always keep in mind cloud computing standards. Over time, the enterprise and the mixed cloud computing environment are developing and growing simultaneously. They may require migrating workloads and data from one cloud computing provider to another. In particular, the flexibility, scalability, and compliance of vendor SLAs are critical in long-term applications, especially when multiple vendors are involved.

10. Check other considerations. Does the potential vendor's cloud computing SLAs address these issues in the context of an inability to commit to the flexibility, scalability, or cost advantages of cloud computing?

Acceptable transaction delays. Does it co-exist with internal settings, or is there a load or peak problem associated with integration?

Refund。 However, no matter how the cloud vendor's payment policy is free or customer friendly, the fact that refunds are not possible and that even a refund is usually sufficient for future payments.

The development of cloud computing SLAs. Rapid technology and business requirements change the need for a hybrid cloud computing environment to accept future SLA versions to meet changing business needs, rather than being constrained by strict vendor SLAs.

The bottom line is that consumers should have a good understanding of their it needs, and in SLA evaluations, it is important to be clear about the business output that is required to achieve through cloud computing, regardless of the complexity, limitations, or confusion of the vendor's cloud-computing SLAs.