Were he living today, Benjamin Franklin might say, “Nothing is certain, except death, taxes, and computer crashes”. Despite some claims, all cloud computing services will be subject to outages. No system, however large, nor process, however elaborate, nor support, however fanatical, can prevent computers from occasionally going down. The important point to keep in mind is the word “occasionally”. Occasional outages should be expected, planned for, and accepted as cost of doing business. What determines the definition of an occasional outage is a negotiated agreement between two parties called a service level agreement (or SLA).
SLAs really offer three things: a setting of expectations, a small measure of financial compensation in the event of more than occasional outages, and a means of comparing two similarly priced services. Customers of cloud computing should recall that SLAs have their origins in the telephone company efforts to manage their risk. Like the airlines’ lost luggage policies, an SLA limits the service provider’s liability to a percentage of the service fee no matter how large the loss to the customer. So matter how carefully crafted an SLA, it’s just a piece of paper and cannot prevent an outage from occurring. Customers of cloud computing should also keep in mind that no matter how small or large the compensation, it will still be more than they will get from an internal organization under similar circumstances. So while SLAs are important, they should not provide a false sense of security.
In order to not to devote more time to an SLA than it is worth, we have developed a four step method for dealing with them in a straightforward, business-like manner. The four steps are to define, negotiate, measure, and report.
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