The Cloud SLA as a Living Document

Many data center and hosting providers offer "100 percent uptime." Since it's difficult to guarantee uptime, what they're usually offering is a service level agreement (SLA) that stipulates penalties in the event of an outage. Are SLAs as effective as they should be? And are they any different in the cloud than in the data center?

"We need SLA's, but maybe not for the commonly held belief of why," writes Mark Thiele, the founder and President of Data Center Pulse, in a new post at the DCP blog. Mark looks at several common assumptions about service level agreements, and how they hold up in the cloud computing model.

"The SLA must be treated as a work in progress and a living document," writes Thiele, whose day job is Executive VP of Data Center Technology at Switch.  "Your SLA should be a tool for helping you define requirements against 'real world' needs and capabilities, while taking into account what you actually have versus what you're asking for. Communication, communication, communication, it is the key to having a successful partnership, whether it's cloud or some other business arrangement. "

Read the full post at Data Center Pulse.