Monday, October 8, 2012

Engaging the Hybrid Cloud: Part 2: SLAs

SLAs

What is your cloud-based application’s availability and reliability? When an application is hosted on-premise, availability and reliability is your responsibility, and if it’s critical to business operations, you put a lot of effort into maintaining it.

Again, with the move to the cloud, this becomes the cloud provider’s concern, but you still need to keep in mind the application’s role in the bigger picture. How well would the business tolerate moments of application unavailability and unreliability?

For example, if a cloud-based HR application wasn’t available for a day or two, it probably wouldn’t impact a supermarket’s business process.

However, if a cloud-based supply-chain application wasn’t available for even an hour or two, it would wreak havoc on a supermarket’s business process. The lack of availability would mean a lack of deliveries, empty shelves, and loss of revenue.

A thorough SLA will communicate to your cloud provider in no uncertain terms which applications your business counts on the most, and what the consequences will be should those applications fail.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

(This post was first published at http:blogs.axway.com

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