Understanding your Cloud SLAs: key findings from SLA-Ready Final Impact Workshop

Cloud computing can be a real enabler for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) by gaining operational efficiency or simply creating a company from scratch – “born in the cloud”. It is often key to boosting competitiveness by opening up a business to a much bigger market. In order to exploit the cloud, SMEs need to sign a contract with a cloud service provider, so they will need to read and understand a cloud Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Before signing a cloud contract, all businesses need to understand specific terms of service and SLAs, whether buying an off-the-shelf-service or negotiating the terms. The SLA includes legal and technical computing terms and often SMEs do not have time and expertise to fully understand them.

This is when SLA-Ready comes into play

SLA-Ready is a European support project funded under H2020 that focuses on giving businesses a better understanding of cloud Service Level Agreement (SLA)terminology and service lifecycle management. We provide free and independent online tools and services specifically designed for the private sector.

SLA-Ready aims to give you a better understanding of Cloud Service Level Agreements, so you can focus on what you do best - doing business and building your customer base.

SLA-Ready Impact Workshop in Brussels

SLA-Ready organised in December 2016 an Impact workshop, hosted by DG Connect, bringing together cloud customers and providers to increase understanding of customer needs and best practices for greater transparency and standardisation of SLAs.

This one-day workshop highlighted both how the outputs of SLA-Ready has benefitted the SME and scientific communities and also identified future steps necessary if greater transparency and clarity is to be achieved in cloud SLAs.

To better deliver the outputs of this event we create a Final Report to put together all key findings for our Impact Workshop.

We put all this information in one document, which is free to download at this page.