Translating business KPIs into cloud SLAs

Frankly, infrastructure in the cloud should be a black box for a business. Infrastructure is like turning on a water tap. Some IT companies referred to operating cloud infrastructure as liquid or fluid IT for that reason: it was simply there, all the time. As a consequence, the focus on SLAs shifted to the business itself. Also, that is part of cloud adoption. As enterprises are moving ahead in the adoption process, a lot of businesses are also adopting a different way of working. If we can have flexible, agile infrastructure in the cloud, we can also speed up the development of environments and applications. Still, also in the cloud, we have to carefully consider service-level objectives and KPIs.

Let’s have a look at the cloud SLA. What are topics that would have to be covered in an SLA? The A stands for agreement and, from a legal perspective, it would be a contract. Therefore, an SLA typically has the format and the contents...