Published on the 06/05/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Technology executives may buy cloud services, but they have little faith in the service level agreements on offer and almost three in four think cloud companies actively hide problems…
A global survey of 740 IT professionals, including 30 from Australia and New Zealand and a further 100 across Asia Pacific, have delivered a damning scorecard on cloud vendor service level agreements (SLAs).
In general respondents reported that cloud provider SLAs are; “failing to address the needs of customers because they are too simplistic.” According to the report which was conducted by Research in Action on behalf of application performance management company Compuware APM; “Vanity SLAs provide a false sense of security and do not capture the true customer and end-user requirements that properly mitigate business risks with cloud infrastructure.”
In all, 73 percent of surveyed professionals were concerned that cloud providers were hiding problems at the infrastructure or platform level; 79 percent believed that SLAs were too simplistic; and 75 percent expressed concern that a lack of control would prevent them from optimising the end-user experience and the return on investment of moving applications to the cloud.
“Having handed over control to cloud providers, IT departments have lost much of their ability to troubleshoot and fine-tune IT services,” said Thomas Mendel, managing director at Research in Action. “This doesn’t just make it tricky to optimise performance for end-users, but it can also severely affect the bottom line. When faced with new IT challenges and risks, businesses can’t afford to waste time playing the blame game when something goes wrong. Having the ability to work with their cloud provider to quickly get to the heart of the issue and resolve the matter is essential to alleviate risk and hindrances while moving investment to the cloud.”
Many respondents noted that the problems were exacerbated in multi-tenanted cloud environments, with 60 percent saying they were concerned about the performance implications of having “noisy neighbours” in the cloud.
The report argues that business should insist on flexible SLAs that mirror their needs rather than simply focus on meeting cloud providers’ reporting needs.
It’s a fine ambition but rather overplays the clout that a typical enterprise might have when negotiating with one of the giants of the cloud world such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft. For most organisations the SLAs on offer are pretty much set in stone along with the terms and conditions.
Nevertheless for those cloud vendors which are interested in learning what their clients want, for the record the most important SLA measures to enterprise IT professionals are end-user response times, availability based on continuous monitoring, real time SLA reporting, error rate on transactions and actual versus budgeted costs.
