Cloud SLAs under scrutiny again

The question of just how valuable and relevant Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are when it comes to evaluating or measuring the performance of cloud services has risen to the fore again. This follows the announcement of the results of a survey conducted by Research in Action and sponsored by Compuware.

The study found that 79 percent of IT professionals worldwide believe that typical SLAs that are built around availability are too simplistic and fail to address the risks of moving and managing applications into the cloud.

Additionally, 63 percent of respondents indicated there is a need for more meaningful and granular SLA metrics that are geared towards ensuring the continuous delivery of a high quality end-user experience.

When asked which metrics they would most like to see as part of their SLAs with cloud service providers, the top three responses were response time and quality for every end user interaction; availability based on deep continuous monitoring; and real-time SLA reporting.

The findings also revealed that nearly three quarters of businesses believe their cloud providers could be hiding problems at an infrastructure or platform level that impact on the performance of applications. Some 60 percent of respondents expressed further anxiety that other, co-located tenants consuming difficult-to-partition resources, could impact their own workload performance.

“Entrusting mission critical business applications that drive revenue and critical business processes require ultimate trust and accountability in a cloud provider,” said Michael Masterson, Director of Cloud Solutions for Compuware APM’s business unit. “Vanity metrics like simple uptime do not capture well-known issues such as ‘noisy neighbours,’ which can be detrimental to traditional enterprise apps that were not designed to scale and fail horizontally. Applicatio Performance Management is no longer optional; and as customers bet on the cloud, they must demand granular SLA assurances around performance and rapid problem resolution.”

The research also showed that 75 percent of IT professionals fear that the loss of control could prevent them from fully optimising their application and reduce their return on investment from the cloud.

The limited visibility into infrastructure was also found to be adding new risk and cost, with 62 percent of businesses claiming that they find it harder to troubleshoot problems in 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.”