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Cloud Computing: Businesses Fret Over Weak Cloud SLAs
Before jumping into Cloud computing, many customers worry about the risk of losing control of their data and applications once they move to the cloud vendor. It seems like there might be good reason to worry.
Lydia Leong, Vice President at Gartner, for example, says that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has long had the “dubious status” of having the “worst SLA (service level agreement) of any major cloud provider.” Amazon has been long criticized for some time for having a weak SLA. But, in early December, after HP announced the terms of its new cloud services, Leong says that HP is now competing strongly with Amazon for having an even worse set of SLAs.
Both AWS and HP SLAs impose strict guidelines for how users must architect their cloud systems for the SLAs to apply in the case of service disruptions. The costs are steep for a customer to comply with and be eligible for the terms of the SLA.
With AWS, for downtime to be covered by the SLA, a customer must be running their application in at least two of Amazon’s availability zones and not be able to access either application. With HP, a customer would need to have their application running in each of HP’s AZ’s and not be able to access any of them. Gartner’s Leong commented that “Amazon’s SLA gives enterprises heartburn. HP had the opportunity to do significantly better, but hasn’t. To me, it’s a toss-up which SLA is worse.”
Robert Desisto, Vice President and analyst at Gartner, was reported by SearchCIO/TechTarget as saying that “The bottom line is, if vendors are so confident about their performance, why not put it down on paper? What is the resistance? The resistance is they don’t want to have the liability out there that they won’t be able to perform as advertised.”
Jay Heiser, Cloud security expert at Gartner, told NetworkWorld that not only are SLAs weak but other details of cloud internal operations are fuzzy at best. “It remains a common complaint that cloud service providers are being ambiguous around what they’re specifically doing to protect customers.” Heister said that while vendors often tell customers that they have implemented high levels of availability and security they often provide scant details for how they go about achieving those levels and they will sometimes say that being too explicit in describing their operational details represents a security threat.
