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Cloud Computing: Understanding the Limits of Cloud SLAs
While often businesses cite security as their most common worry about cloud services, the risk of downtime is another factor that’s not spoken of nearly as much.
‘Standard cloud SLAs’ often provide little to the customer in compensation if/when things go wrong. SLAs typically focus on uptime/downtime and outline remuneration plans that happen in the event the service is down. When downtimes occur, it is often up to the customer to complain and initiate a request for credit, and the credit that is provided is often capped at some percentage of the monthly service cost and the credit is often only then applied against future billings. Lydia Leong, Gartner analyst, commented that “Customers should expect that the likelihood of a meaningful giveback is basically nil.”
“A lot of companies simply don’t know what to look for when it comes to SLAs, and that means that a significant proportion of service provider customers just take whatever service level agreement they are offered,” said Robert Mahowald, a research vice president at IDC.
Michael Masterson, director of Cloud Services at Compuware, wrote on the Compuware blog, “imagine a company selling a premium new car whose warranty includes 2M piston revolutions, 10k door latch cycles, and 20k window open and closes. And even then, with 99.5% availability, you might still be unable to start the car 2 days a year, or during winter there might be 2 weeks where the doors won’t unlock until the sun melts the ice in the door locks. Ready to buy?”
A Compuware Cloud White Paper had the following findings:
- Nearly three-quarters of cloud providers hide performance problems due to infrastructure or platform issues
- 75 percent of cloud customers feel that they can’t optimize the ROI of their applications because their control over them is restricted
- 79 percent of cloud customers are unhappy with the SLA’s, finding them much too simplistic
