Cloud Service Level Agreements –Issues and Development

Cloud computing is a broad paradigm that has influence across major fields of human endeavour. The unique services it offers makes organisations curious about understanding the cloud and its likely benefits. The cloud offers services such as custom built applications deployed on remote systems and ready to use platforms which reduce the efforts needed to develop and deploy applications for cloud users. In addition to these, there are other services such as storage and infrastructural resources which the cloud also avails to its users. These services are usually provided to users on a pay-per-use bases, thus necessitating the need to have documented agreements in place to ensure a smooth relationship between the providers and the users. These documented agreements are referred to as Service Level Agreements (SLAs). SLAs detail the terms, conditions and service expectation of the users from their service provider in terms of availability, redundancy, uptime, cost and penalties for violations. These ensures users’ confidence in the services being offered. In this paper, the state of the art with respect to cloud SLAs is presented. The paper seeks to answer questions related of what the current trends and developments in terms of cloud SLA are and it does so by means of a review of existing literature available. This paper therefore is a survey of cloud SLAs, their issues and developmental challenges. It provides a guide for future research and is expected to benefit prospective cloud users and cloud providers alik

Analysis of the causes and level of maintenance for enterprise systems in construction companies

A construction company without a similar information technology (IT) system in the past has insufficient historical data to use for investment decision-making of IT system. An estimation of maintenance costs is especially more uncertain than the initial investment costs, and the uncertainty is greater when the IT system is used over a long period, such as an enterprise system (ES). This study proposes estimation criteria for the maintenance costs of an ES for an accurate investment decision. First, the causes of maintenance are determined, and the level of maintenance analyzed. Then, the result is compared with a general trend of maintenance incidence (bathtub curve) that is widely used as reference criteria to estimate maintenance cost. The level of maintenance was high during the early stage but steadily decreased in the middle and end stage because high-cost maintenance activities were postponed with the approach of the time in which the ES was being restructured. This trend is different from the bathtub curve that increases again during the end stage. Thus, when a maintenance contract is negotiated, the maintenance level that affects maintenance cost should be considered as well as the incidence of maintenance

The state of data quality arts in (technical) service reporting

Service Level Management (SLM) in IT Service Management (ITSM) contains Technical Service Reports (TSRs) to report Service Quality (SQ) based on the Service Level Agreement (SLA). However, producing TSRs for a large enterprise has Data Quality (DQ) challenges. The source of technical metrics in TSRs comes from large, unverified and non-normalized system-generated events and logs in a large enterprise environment. Moreover, configuration items and service information meta-data that are essential for producing these SLM reports are facing DQ problems. These challenges lead to low reports' Data Quality (DQ) that destroy customer's trust and management visibility, which leads to financial penalties and SQ issues. In order to improve the TSRs' DQ and consequently improving the SQ and reducing the risks of financial penalties, researchers need to know the limitations and definitions of DQ for TSRs, and this is not feasible, except for having a comprehensive overview of DQ dimensions and its processes. This paper provides a statement on the situation of the DQ in existing literature by having eyes on technical service reporting issues

Cloud Adoption Decision-making Processes by Small Businesses: A Multiple Case Study

Cloud services have emerged as a compelling technology with immense benefits, but many companies still have concerns about cloud services adoption because of several failures that have occurred, including mistakes by service providers, exploitation of security flaws by hackers, and immature policies and procedures. The specific problem is how small businesses often lack the understanding of the ramifications of their respective decision-making processes to adopt cloud services. There is little understanding of the decision-making processes managers use in cloud services adoption. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore the decision-making processes of 3 small businesses in information technology, legal, and healthcare industries and 3 cloud service providers with a total of 12 participants. The primary question explored the decision-making factors that contribute to the success of companies adopting cloud services. The conceptual framework was based on Mintzberg et al.’s strategic decision-making model, which consists of problem identification, solution development, and selection. Data for the study were collected through semi structured interviews and were analyzed using cross-case analysis. Five prominent themes that emerged were cost savings, cloud information security, competitive advantage, skills availability, and reliability. This research uncovered important factors in the decision-making process, including lack of training and a formal cloud adoption framework. This research may influence positive social change by deepening small businesses’ understanding of essential factors in the decision to successfully adopting cloud services