Practical Guide to Cloud Service Level Agreements

Citation
Cloud Standards Customer Council, Practical Guide to Cloud Service Level Agreements (Ver. 1.0) (Apr. 10, 2012) (full-text).

Overview
The aim of this guide is to provide a practical reference to help enterprise information technology (IT) and business decision makers as they analyze and consider service level agreements (SLA) from different cloud service providers. The paper gives guidance to decision makers on what to expect and what to be aware of as they evaluate SLAs from their cloud computing providers. A checklist of key criteria for evaluating and comparing SLAs from different providers is included. Additionally, this paper highlights the role that standards play to improve interoperability and comparability across different cloud providers, and identify areas where future standardization could be effective.

SLAs are important to clearly set expectations for service between the cloud consumer (buyer) and the cloud provider (seller). Each cloud entity engaged by the enterprise should have a cloud SLA defined, including: cloud provider, cloud carrier, cloud broker and even cloud auditor. Consideration must also be given to the different models of service delivery: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS)) as each model brings different requirements. This paper focuses primarily on the SLA details between the cloud consumer and cloud provider, and focuses on the requirements that are common across the various service models (emphasis is given to the IaaS service model since SLAs are more advanced in this area).