SLA expectations run high

Dimension Data has announced the results of an independent research study commissioned by the group that highlights strong public and private cloud adoption. Confirming the importance of service level agreements (SLAs) when purchasing cloud services, 95% of respondents see cloud SLAs as a priority, with 55% considering SLAs right upfront in the negotiation process. Executed by Vanson Bourne in February 2014, the survey covered 200 IT decision makers and multiple industry sectors in the UK featuring respondents from cloud-using organisations with over 501 employees.

Findings include: 76% of IT leaders said their organisation has purchased private or public cloud infrastructure-as-as-service (IaaS); 49% have public cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) or platform-as-as-service (PaaS); and 25% have hybrid cloud IaaS. More than half of respondents, 53%, confirmed they are running internal web applications in the cloud, while 48% are using it for client-facing web applications. A significant 39% of those polled are deploying enterprise applications in the cloud.
Cloud usage is also extending beyond Europe into other key markets. While 95% of UK IT leaders deploy cloud services in Europe today, additional services are also deployed in: North America (28); Asia Pacific (19); Middle East and Africa (12%); South America (8%); and Australia (6%).

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) Expectations
The majority of CIOs, 69%, believes the most important measure of a cloud service provider’s SLA is a 99.9% guarantee for minimum server uptime (8.7 hours downtime per year); while 59% expect a 99.9% guarantee for minimum network availability. CIOs confirmed the average minimum expectation for a cloud availability SLA for both servers and networking is 99.73%. However, a surprising 65% of respondents admitted they are not clear on what constitutes a failure or violation of their cloud service provider’s SLA and almost all IT leaders, 97% felt that cloud SLAs are difficult to decipher to some degree.

Best Practice Recommendations
When evaluating cloud service providers, Dimension Data recommends the following best practice approach:
· Look for a provider that can help with both public and private cloud solutions
· Look for a provider with SLAs of at least 99.73% for both servers and networking
· Demand clear SLAs that are available online
· Look for a global provider, because eventually you’ll need it

Commenting on the findings, Andy Lancaster, Director of Cloud Services at Dimension Data, said: “The survey highlights the continued growth of cloud services as well as the often misunderstood issue of cloud SLAs, but this should not be viewed as a deterrent to cloud adoption. At Dimension Data, we advise our customers to consider the SLA when evaluating the cloud marketplace to ensure that they find an appropriate SLA from the right cloud provider for their business. These considerations include; uptime commitment, how uptime is calculated, what the SLA covers (what is excluded), what constitutes failure and what violation penalties exist.”

Additional Findings
· On average, CIOs expect a minimum availability guarantee of 99.73%.
· 23% think it is unreasonable for CSPs to estimate their availability on the prior year’s performance
· 26% of respondents think it is unreasonable to be required to have more than one availability zone or region fail before it is considered a violation of their SLA
· 50% say that it is unreasonable in the instance that a server fails to be required to build another server and have that fail before it is considered a violation of their SLA

“The fine print of an SLA is often the best indicator of how, and how often, the provider expects their service to fail,” continued Lancaster. “For example, if a provider requires their clients to build in 2+ availability zones, and both zones have to fail before the SLA is violated, this indicates that the provider expects single zones to fail. This is particularly common with three popular cloud providers, which require multiple availability zones to be in use for an outage to be considered an SLA violation. There is much more to a provider’s cloud SLA than simply an uptime percentage guarantee and it’s important that businesses look to those that can help them run through the detail with a fine toothed comb on their behalf. The truth really is in the detail.”

Unlike best effort cloud providers, Dimension Data provides cloud services with strong service level agreements (SLAs), configurable networking and security, and high performance systems to support IaaS, production SaaS and web applications, enterprise applications such as SAP, as well as testing and development.