Cloud SLAs the next bugbear for enterprise IT

The ever-growing network of IT services delivered by cloud computing are making yet another area of business unsettled: service-level agreements.

Service-level agreements (SLAs) are the cornerstone of every IT service delivered into an enterprise; some are foundational enough that they are federally regulated, like agreements with communications providers. Businesses rely on them to hold providers to account. An SLA specifies exactly what and how a provider is expected to do, such as responding to problems within a certain time window, and what reparations a provider has to make if downtime occurs and the customer loses business. But that game is changing in cloud computing, often in ways that the enterprise may not be prepared to handle.

"The ease and convenience with which cloud computing arrangements can be set up may lull customers into overlooking the significant issues that can arise when key data and processes are entrusted to cloud service providers," said a new report released in March by the Cloud Legal Project at Queen Mary, University of London. The authors surveyed 31 contracts from 27 cloud providers and found a wide range of issues that IT professionals need to be aware of.

Some cloud contracts had clauses that specifically voided data protection requirements, including accidental destruction of application data or intentional sharing of customer data; others claimed the right to terminate accounts without notice or without providing any cause.

Most of them claimed the right to amend the terms of their contracts on the fly, simply by updating their websites, a fact the Cloud Legal Project found "most disturbing" and something that would probably give an IT manager a case of the flaming fantods (or at least severe heebie-jeebies). Even honoring the terms of the contract could be problematic.

"The provider may be in a different part of the world; the contract may operate under the laws of another jurisdiction; the contract may seek to exclude liability for the loss suffered, or may limit liability to what is, in effect, a nominal amount," said the report.

With cloud computing, many of the generally agreed assumptions about how an SLA may work are thrown into disarray; for example, April's Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage in its Elastic Block Store (EBS) service critically impacted business systems for thousands of users. But that contingency wasn't even mentioned in Amazon's terms of service, which guarantees an SLA of 99.95% uptime for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) only. AWS gave back credit for affected users, but it wasn't obligated to do so (it is also one of the providers noted above that reserves the right to change its terms or terminate accounts without notice).

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Source: searchcloudcomputing.com
By: Carl Brooks