Melvin Greer, Senior Fellow and
Chief Strategist, Cloud Computing,
Lockheed Martin; Chair, CSCC
Steering Committee
Cloud service level agreements are important to
clearly set expectations for service between cloud consumers and providers.
Providing guidance to decision makers on what to expect and what to be aware
of as they evaluate and compare SLAs from cloud computing providers is
critical since standard terminology and values for cloud SLAs are emerging but
currently do not exist.
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The Cloud Standards Customer Council held a webinar to
introduce the completed "Practical Guide to Cloud Service Level
Agreements," on Tuesday, April 10, 2012.
If you missed any or all of the webinar you can download the deck or the
entire webcast below:
The Guide highlights the critical elements of a service level agreement
(SLA) for cloud computing and provides guidance on what to expect and what to be
aware of when negotiating an SLA. The guide articulates a set of requirements
from a consumer's perspective and identifies elements that need to be addressed
via open standards through CSCC's liaison partnerships with key standards
development organizations.
Melvin Greer, senior fellow and chief strategist, Cloud Computing, Lockheed
Martin; chair, CSCC steering committee, lead the webinar describing the
rationale behind the development of the guide, the target audience and the
intended benefits of the guide. A question and answer period will immediately
follow the presentation.
Representatives from the following organizations developed the Practical
Guide to Cloud Service Level Agreements, along with input and feedback from the
general CSCC membership: Boeing, CA Technologies, cebe IT & KM, Cloud
Perspectives, CloudOne Corporation, Ekartha, Fort Technologies, Hoboken
Consulting Group LLC, IBM, Kroger, Lockheed Martin, Powersoft Computer Solutions
Ltd, Second University of Naples, and Wohl Associates.
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Amy Wohl,
Editor, Amy Wohl's Opinions
Today, customers complain regularly that SLAs are
just another form of vendor boilerplate, to the extent they exist at all, and
that it is difficult if not impossible to get much modification. They also
point out that they want the SLA because it will cause the provider to put
some skin in the game, not because the penalties would solve their problems in
the case of outages or other situations covered by the SLA. That doesn't mean
we don't need SLA's; we do. It's important we make it clear what is going on
now versus what we would like to see/influence for the future and when we are
hoping that future will occur.
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