An Informational Model as a Guideline to Design Sustainable Green SLA (GSLA)

Abstract

Recently, Service Level Agreement (SLA) and green SLA (GSLA) becomesvery important for both the service providers/vendors and as well as forthe users/customers. There are many ways to inform users/customers aboutvarious services with its inherent execution functionalities and evennon-functional/Quality of Service (QoS) aspects through SLAs. However,these basic SLAs actually do not cover eco-efficient green issues or ITethics issues for sustainable development. That is why green SLA (GSLA)already came into play for achieving sustainability in the industry.Nevertheless, the current practice of GSLA in the industry do notrespect the sustainability at all. GSLA defined as a formal agreementincorporating all the traditional commitments respecting some greencomputing parameters such as carbon footprint, energy consumption etc.Therefore, there are still gaps for achieving sustainability throughexisting GSLA. To reach the goal of achieving sustainability and gettingmore customers, many IT (Information Technology) and ICT (Informationand Communication Technology) business are looking for a real GSLA whichwould meet the ecological, economical and ethical aspects (3Es) ofsustainability. This research discovers the missing parameters andintroduce new parameters under sustainability hoods. In addition, itdefines GSLA of sustainability with new green performance indicators andtheir measurable units. It also discovers the management complexity ofproposed new GSLA through designing a general informational model andidentifies various new entities and their effects with other entitiesunder three pillars of sustainability. The ICT engineer could use theinformational model as a guideline to design a sustainable GSLA for theindustry. Therefore, the proposed model could help different serviceproviders/vendors to define their future business strategies for theupcoming sustainable society.