As cloud apps become more business-critical, the CIO is emerging as the cloud services broker. In this new IT model, which is expected to expand rapidly in the next 12 months, CIOs can push cloud service providers to deliver detailed SLAs.
The rise of multisourcing has thrust operating level agreements in the IT outsourcing spotlight. But establishing OLAs among service providers can be difficult.
For some organisations the hassle and uncertainty that can arise from multiple vendor relationships is best addressed by putting all of their eggs into the one carefully chosen basket. South Australian transport and logistics company, Northline, recently entered into a five year, $5 million contract with integrator Brennan, which will handle more than 300 portable and desktop computers in addition to servers, enterprise software and LAN communications. Basically, everything except telecommunications, which is provided by Optus.
This is the type of analyst report headline that cloud computing vendors don't want to read: "Empty Promises and Tough Luck: Yankee Group Exposes the Cloud's Fine Print."
You've probably seen a hundred-or even a thousand-articles criticizing cloud computing Service Level Agreements (SLAs). A common example in those articles is the putatively low Amazon Web Services SLA. Typically authors of these kind of articles go on to cite recent outages by cloud providers, implying (or stating directly) that cloud computing falls woefully short of the true SLA requirements of enterprises, often described as "five nines," i.e., 99.999 per cent availability.
Reward good behavior and punish poor performance. Sounds like a commonsense approach to achieving results. And if that tactic works in the chaos of the kindergarten classroom, it seemingly couldn't hurt in achieving desired outcomes when outsourcing.