SLA@SOI

In recent years, significant advances have been made in SLA management. This progress has largely focused on the building pieces necessary to create the communications, interactions and corresponding flows required for SLA management. However, to be truly useful, support for the business aspects and terms required in the real business world also need to be addressed.

In SLA@SOI we have identified the following aspects of business that need to be addressed within SLAs:

Functional description: The offered service must be detailed in terms of the features and functionality supported and available to customers.

Business model supported: All the information referring to the selling process must be defined and described in detail, to avoid ambiguity for the customer. The business model description should detail:

• Offer types associated with the Quality of Service supported
• Pricing model
• Billing and payment constraints
• Modification and alteration of prices  if applicable
• Restrictions and constraints

Penalties: Detailed specifications about the penalties incurred when problems arise in the consumption of the service. This information is attached to the guarantee terms definitions that explain in detail how the different agreed terms are used.

Termination clauses: The termination clauses have to be automated and they have to accommodate both parties in the contract. The termination of the SLA can be triggered by certain customer aspects as well as by certain service provider constraints.

Service information events and reports: It must be possible for the final customer to select the kind of information that they wish to obtain automatically. This information is defined in terms of events monitored as well as reports associated with the customer’s service. For instance a customer that uses a storage service may want to know how large their storage consumption is per day. These Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) may not be related to the guarantee terms fulfilled by the SLA.

Support mechanism and contact details: It must be possible to specify the kind of support offered to the customer should they have a problem or inquiry. The support information provided should include timetable details as well as details of the different support channels available.

Disaster recovery and data security in IT Systems: It must be possible to define Backup/Restore policies in order to guarantee the persistence of information, if the service offered to the customer manages and stores data. Also it must be possible to define the security mechanisms that are employed by the service.

Changes to terms in the service: The process to update the service conditions or characteristics must also be considered. It must also be possible to define the mechanism used to inform the customer about such changes.

Customer/Provider requirements and constraints: In many cases, it is necessary for the customers or providers to express some requirements in terms of limits or constraints in the service consumption. Usually these aspects are related to legal constraints to be followed by the customers or providers of one specific country, because they are imposed by the relevant Regulatory Authority. Example constraints include:

• Personal data storage cannot to be stored outside the country
• Maximum prices and/or quality shall apply
• Restrictions in sharing of personal data with third parties associated with the service provider
• The prohibition of delivery advertisement
• Personal data usage restrictions for specific tasks (e.g. data mining)

As we can see, the variety and complexity of business  concerns is both broad and deep. However, we have found that each specific business has their own kind of restrictions and bounds.

In the SLA@SOI project, one of our main aims is to create a business framework that supports the realities of the business world. In our Business Management focus area we are actively researching these aspects, building a strong foundation to support a wide range of grounded, industry-driven use-cases.

Juan Lambea Rueda, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo

Tags: Business, management, sla

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 13:12 and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.