{"id":3506,"date":"2012-12-18T07:00:58","date_gmt":"2012-12-18T15:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.formtek.com\/blog\/?p=3506"},"modified":"2012-12-18T07:00:58","modified_gmt":"2012-12-18T15:00:58","slug":"cloud-computing-businesses-fret-over-weak-cloud-slas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/cloud-computing-businesses-fret-over-weak-cloud-slas\/","title":{"rendered":"Cloud Computing: Businesses Fret Over Weak Cloud SLAs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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. \u00a0It seems like there might be good reason to worry.<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Lydia Leong bio\" href=\"www.linkedin.com\/in\/lydialeong\" target=\"_blank\">Lydia Leong<\/a>, Vice President at Gartner, for example,\u00a0<a title=\"Lydia Leong comments on AWS SLAs\" href=\"http:\/\/blogs.gartner.com\/lydia_leong\/2011\/01\/05\/whats-cloud-iaas-really-about\/\" target=\"_blank\">says that<\/a> <a title=\"Amazon Web Services (AWS)\" href=\"http:\/\/aws.amazon.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Amazon Web Services<\/a> (AWS) has long had the &#8220;dubious status&#8221; of having the &#8220;worst <a title=\"Wikipedia defintion of SLA\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Service-level_agreement\" target=\"_blank\">SLA <\/a>(service level agreement) of any major cloud provider.&#8221; \u00a0Amazon has been long criticized for some time\u00a0<a title=\"Amazon weak SLA -- 2011\" href=\"http:\/\/archive.feedblitz.com\/216749\/~3957659\" target=\"_blank\">for having a weak SLA<\/a>. \u00a0But, in <a title=\"HP Cloud Services\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sacbee.com\/2012\/12\/05\/5033863\/cloud-cruiser-announces-cloud.html\" target=\"_blank\">early December, after HP announced the terms of its new cloud services<\/a>,\u00a0<a title=\"Gartner's Leong on HP's Cloud SLA\" href=\"http:\/\/blogs.gartner.com\/lydia_leong\/2012\/12\/05\/cloud-iaas-slas-can-be-meaningless\/\" target=\"_blank\">Leong says that HP is now competing strongly with Amazon for <\/a>having an even worse set of SLAs.<\/p>\n<p>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. \u00a0The costs are steep for a customer to comply with and be eligible for the terms of the SLA.<\/p>\n<p>With AWS, for downtime to be covered by the SLA, a customer must be running their application in at least two of Amazon&#8217;s \u00a0availability zones and not be able to access either application. \u00a0With HP, a customer would need to have their application running in each of HP&#8217;s AZ&#8217;s and not be able to access any of them. \u00a0Gartner&#8217;s Leong commented that &#8220;Amazon&#8217;s SLA gives enterprises heartburn. HP had the opportunity to do significantly better, but hasn&#8217;t. To me, it&#8217;s a toss-up which SLA is worse.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Vice President at Gartner -- Robert Desisto bio\" href=\"www.linkedin.com\/pub\/robert-desisto\/44\/482\/aa9\" target=\"_blank\">Robert Desisto<\/a>, Vice President and analyst at Gartner, was<a title=\"SearchCIO\/TechTarget reports on SLAs\" href=\"http:\/\/searchcio.techtarget.com\/news\/2240171259\/As-clouds-use-expands-cloud-SLAs-more-important-than-ever\" target=\"_blank\"> reported by SearchCIO\/TechTarget<\/a> as saying that &#8220;The bottom line is, if vendors are so confident about their performance, why not put it down on paper? What is the resistance? \u00a0The resistance is they don&#8217;t want to have the liability out there that they won&#8217;t be able to perform as advertised.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Jay Heiser bio\" href=\"http:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/jheiser\" target=\"_blank\">Jay Heiser<\/a>, Cloud security expert at Gartner,\u00a0<a title=\"NetworkWorld comment on cloud security\" href=\"http:\/\/www.networkworld.com\/news\/2012\/111412-gartner-cloud-security-264268.html?hpg1=bn\" target=\"_blank\">told NetworkWorld<\/a> that not only are SLAs weak but other details of cloud internal operations are fuzzy at best. \u00a0&#8220;It remains a common complaint that cloud service providers are being ambiguous around what they&#8217;re specifically doing to protect customers.&#8221; \u00a0Heister 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 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Lydia Leong, Vice President<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/cloud-computing-businesses-fret-over-weak-cloud-slas\/\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cloud-computing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3506\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}