As
business organizations opt for support from the cloud to provision Software,
Platform, or Infrastructure services the need for warranty through the service value
chain becomes paramount. Service warranty is gained by achieving specified
levels of availability, capacity, continuity, and security.
The dynamic, nature of the business and
varied demand from multiple customers and user profiles must be considered when
defining and investing in cloud architectures. Each customer will expect that only their
application or service will be delivered to users when in fact multiple
customer and user communities could be leverage from the scalability and shared
resources in the cloud.
Availability/Capacity
and the Cloud
Service providers must gain assurance that
multiple instances of the same application are delivered in a scalable manner. In order to ensure availability and leverage
capacity on demand additional tools and technologies such as load balancing,
server virtualization, application delivery controllers and more will be
necessary to integrate deep into the infrastructure, back end systems and
network. All of this is disguised or
invisible to the customer as the “Cloud”.
Considerations from the business side will have to ensure that the
transition of any new or changed services are enabled via a combination of both
internal and external services. Therefore;
designing, delivering and managing the end to end service delivery through the
value chain still needs to be addressed.
Service Level
Management and the Cloud
The Service Level agreements will only
deliver if underpinning contracts for cloud services support business and
customer requirements. With cloud
computing the responsibility and integration points shift. Internal sourcing shifts to the cloud provider. Metrics for scalability, availability and
security will require monitoring and reporting on caching, compression, rate
shaping and other cloud unique elements in order to ensure availability and
Service Level Requirements. Inaccurate
or incomplete contracts with the cloud provider could jeopardize the cost
savings, business benefit and value that is expected from the cloud.
Cloudy days ahead
The flight to the cloud continues to
evolve as an advantageous means of sourcing. When managed correctly cloud services can increase
the cadence and velocity of service delivery to meet dynamic business demand. Even
though cloud computing in all its variants is still evolving, unified Service
Level Agreements and Underpinning Contracts with a focus on people and
relationship management help ensure the
cloud computing environment is always fast, secure, and highly available. The
heart of service management withstands evolution and is still vital. The
accountability for provisioning Availability, Capacity, Continuity and Security
still lies with the service provider.
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