Systematic Analysis of Public Cloud Service Level Agreements and Related Business Values

Cloud computing offers lots of attractive benefits to individuals and organizations. However, the adoption rate is a far cry from what it really deserves. Lack of well defined Service Level Agreement (SLA) is one of the key factors. This research aims to provide better understanding of the status quo of the current public cloud service level agreements and to recommend best practices. We conducted a content analysis on around thirty SLAs to identify commonly stated attributes and commonly missing attributes. A follow up case study interviewed a selection of cloud customers further investigates the importance of SLA attributes and its relationship with potential business. The result reveals that some of the commonly missed attributes such as customer support, data protection plan are considered as very important attributes and most SLA attributes are directly related with business values.