In Mr. Grubi blog entry entitled “A Clear SLA Now Can Save a Lot of Headaches Later” Benjamin Grubin makes some very striking points about the importance of having iron-clad service-level agreements for managed server, including cloud computing.
In his blog post, Mr. Grubin states:
“If you’re like a lot of IT pros, you probably are tired of arguing with business units about service issues. The beauty of the private cloud approach is it lets you run IT like an external business. That means you set up a service-level agreement (SLA) with your business units just like any vendor in the public cloud, setting expectations and outlining responsibilities. What this approach does is provide a process for defining the interface between IT and the business units in your company.”
He goes on to say that:
“The SLA should include several key components:
It lists the components necessary for a given service to operate.
It provides a service guarantee based on all of those pieces operating.
It outlines the consequences for failing to meet the service guarantee.
From a business user’s point of view, it’s no different than buying a service outside of the company. If you buy storage on Amazon.com, you can expect to pay a certain amount per megabyte, and you can expect that you will get a certain level of uptime. You also know what will happen if the service goes down and you can’t access it.”
… And now for the fun part.
I was a little surprised when I read this story because not only does it debunk old myths about cloud services and how customers and providers should “behave.” I had no idea even something that seems so “light” and “worry-free” still needs to be regulated. Leaving things up to chance never bodes well for any business. Now I see it’s the same with cloud, whether you’re using private or public cloud.
This is practical advice that business owners ought to take to heart because it will save them a whole lot of trouble in the future. This protects not just the IT department but your entire company. In the long run, “setting expectations and outlining responsibilities” will give you more peace of mind than if you had never bothered to enter into that SLA in the first place. Consider your cloud provider as one of your business associates or clients – at the end of the day it’s just business. So better identify those key components to avoid dealing with risks in the future.
