Cloud Computing and Service Level Management: Is your IT organization and its SLM processes ready to leverage the benefits of Cloud Computing?
Published:
August 13 2009, 11:11 AM
by
Michael King
In the attempted pursuit of keeping my IT knowledge and skills up to date, I have been doing some reading on Cloud Computing. As I read more and more about the idea of Cloud Computing and its development, keeping in mind how it relates to Service Level Management, I see a need for analysis and planning before IT organizations take the leap into Cloud Computing.
Before I continue, the aspect of Cloud Computing that I am referring to is the application/service hosting, a.k.a. SaaS, portion of Cloud Computing. This section of Cloud Computing is where there is high probability that the cost model will be more complex and will require Service Level Agreements (SLA) to guarantee the Quality of Service that has been purchased.
The major selling point for investigating or investing in Cloud Computing is the reduction of overall cost by outsourcing an IT function or service offering. By doing this, an IT organization can potentially reduce their overall service offering costs. From my readings, a major piece of advice that has been offered to IT Organizations is to make sure that they have at least one SLA with the Cloud provider in place to protect their investment. This is definitely good advice and I would not dispute this, but it leaves the IT organization with the potential for confusion and future challenges with maintaining their relationship with their Cloud provider. What happens after the IT organization contracts with Cloud provider? Should they institute new processes to manage this relationship and the newly outsourced services?
Let's assume that the decision has been made by the IT organization to outsource their service offering to a Cloud provider. Now the IT organization has these SLAs in place and is receiving various performance and availability reports and invoices from their provider. The IT organization will need to create processes and assign resources to review and analyze these reports and bills to make sure they are accurate. In addition, if the IT organization is offering/selling the outsourced service to its own set of customers, it will have to reconcile the SLA report results from the Cloud provider (these are now Underpinning Contracts of their service offering) with the SLAs that they have in place with their end customer and any associated invoices; hence the need for serious analysis and planning prior to committing to investing in Cloud Computing.
If the IT organization has embarked on standardizing and hardening the Service Level Management processes surrounding their existing service offerings prior to partnering with a Cloud Computing provider, these organizations will be well suited to benefit from Cloud Computing. These organizations will have well defined SLAs, processes and tools to manage these SLM tasks. These organizations will also be well positioned to associate financial costs and benefits of these service offerings and report them to the business; thus keeping them in line with the overall business strategy and showing value to the business.