Discussion on Cloud Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

               It is important to understand that when any kind of cloud services are provided to customers, then there should be a service level agreement between the customer and the provider to maintain a minimum level of service. It is essential to do so because customers want some guarantee from the service providers that they will ensure a good level of service in different given situations. There can be various points, which can be made part of the SLAs. For instance, one point in the SLAs can be stated as “Provide for disaster recovery and continuity of operations planning and testing, including how and when the cloud service provider is to report such failures and outages to the agency. In addition, how the provider will remediate such situations and mitigate the risks of such problems from recurring” It means that it is the responsibility of the cloud service provider to maintain good service levels and if any risks or issues have occurred, those should not happen again (Cooney, 2016)

               It is a fact that when any cloud service provider provides services, there can be some issues, which are out of control, and those issues cannot be used to hold the service provider responsible for anything. It means that while mentioning SLAs, such limitation should also be mentioned in the document. Microsoft Azure is one of the famous cloud services, and in their cloud SLAs, they have mentioned limitations, where SLAs will not be applicable to certain issues such as “Due to factors outside our reasonable control (for example, natural disaster, war, acts of terrorism, riots, government action, or a network or device failure external to our data centers, including at your site or between your site and our data center)”. They have also mentioned so many terms in their SLAs document, which should be considered by the customer while getting their services. In terms portion of the SLAs document, Microsoft Azure provider has mentioned any claims that “For a claim related to Microsoft Azure, we must receive the claim within two months of the end of the billing month in which the Incident that is the subject of the claim occurred. For claims related to all other Services, we must receive the claim by the end of the calendar month following the month in which the Incident occurred” (Microsoft Azure, 2017)

               It is important for companies or individuals to look for a few things in SLA, who are looking to use any cloud services. Every service provider comes with different types of SLAs, so it is vital to look at their SLAs document in detail to decide, which service provider is providing the best services. As a customer, you should look for a few things in the SLA. The first thing is availability; it means that what kind of service is available from the service provider. Moreover, you should also analyze their SLAs related to cloud software & hardware, as well as, data ownership. In addition to that disaster recovery, as well as, backup services is quite crucial to be analyzed, because if service provider ensures good recovery in case of any issues, then they can be considered a better service provider. One last thing to look in the SLAs document is customer responsibility, which has been mentioned by the service provider so that you understand what is needed on your end (Hein, 2019)

References of Cloud Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Cooney, M. (2016). 10 best cloud SLA practices. Retrieved December 23, 2019, from https://www.networkworld.com/article/3053920/10-best-cloud-sla-practices.html

Hein, D. (2019). 5 Things to Look For in a Cloud Service Level Agreement. Retrieved December 23, 2019, from https://solutionsreview.com/cloud-platforms/5-things-to-look-for-in-a-cloud-service-level-agreement/

Microsoft Azure. (2017). SLA for Cloud Services. Retrieved December 23, 2019, from https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/support/legal/sla/cloud-services/v1_5/