In the five years since the U.S. government put a clear emphasis on utilizing cloud technology, federal procurement offices have engaged in seemingly endless tinkering of contracting vehicles to promote cloud adoption. The core element of virtually every type of federal cloud procurement contract is the service level agreement, upon which billions of dollars of cloud investments are based. However, federal agencies have struggled with incorporating SLAs into cloud contracts that make sense for both the government and vendors.
A good article on a complex topic.
As well as the activities of the Cloud Standards Customer Council, there are some formal standards activities taking place that should help bring some clarity and order to the cloud SLA space in the near future.
The ISO/IEC SC38 cloud computing standards committee is working on a standard numbered 19086 - "Cloud computing SLA framework". 19086 defines consistent terminology in relation to cloud service agreements and cloud service SLAs, defines an extensive set of service level objectives, sets of service qualitative objectives, plus associated metrics. It also deals with the tricky areas of both security and privacy ("data protection") for cloud service SLAs.
The first part of 19086 will become available a little later this year and is going to be useful both for cloud service customers and for cloud service providers.
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The Tricky Business of Crafting Solid Cloud SLAs
Posted by: John K. Higgins June 10, 2016 02:49 PMIn the five years since the U.S. government put a clear emphasis on utilizing cloud technology, federal procurement offices have engaged in seemingly endless tinkering of contracting vehicles to promote cloud adoption. The core element of virtually every type of federal cloud procurement contract is the service level agreement, upon which billions of dollars of cloud investments are based. However, federal agencies have struggled with incorporating SLAs into cloud contracts that make sense for both the government and vendors.
As well as the activities of the Cloud Standards Customer Council, there are some formal standards activities taking place that should help bring some clarity and order to the cloud SLA space in the near future.
The ISO/IEC SC38 cloud computing standards committee is working on a standard numbered 19086 - "Cloud computing SLA framework". 19086 defines consistent terminology in relation to cloud service agreements and cloud service SLAs, defines an extensive set of service level objectives, sets of service qualitative objectives, plus associated metrics. It also deals with the tricky areas of both security and privacy ("data protection") for cloud service SLAs.
The first part of 19086 will become available a little later this year and is going to be useful both for cloud service customers and for cloud service providers.