Understanding SLA elements in cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing security, interoperability, and vendor lock-in are likely to act as inhibitors of the widespread adoption of cloud computing in organizations. This calls for relational and contractual mechanisms to articulate the desired outcomes of service provisioning and acceptable behavior of service recipients and providers. In this paper we conducted a qualitative study interviewing industry experts to understand the extent to which SLA specifications in traditional IT services outsourcing can be applied in cloud computing, identifying elements becoming redundant or not applicable, and new elements capturing the specificity of the business relationships in cloud computing. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.