Keeping Track of the Pieces

If your company is using a private cloud in combination with a public cloud service, what do you do to ensure that you are satisfying the needs of your consumers? This is a difficult question to answer. In fact, today there really isn’t a great solution to this problem, but there are a number of factors to think about:

Many business units will use public cloud services to create projects outside the control of IT. When these services become critical to the business, IT is often brought in after the fact.

Any number of SaaS applications may become mission-critical within the company. Although the advantages of avoiding the day-to-day management and maintenance of these applications are huge, they often aren’t viewed as part of the overall computing environment of the company. In addition, different SaaS applications become interconnected so that they can complete a business process. So, there are huge dependencies between these services that have to be taken into account.

In addition to full SaaS applications, often key business services, such as commerce networks, payment services, and so on, are now essential services within businesses. Various on-premises applications as well as other SaaS applications depend on these services.

All of the pieces have an SLA associated with them. Each one of these environments provides a contract about the level of uptime, performance, and security. However, few vendors would be able to have the technology infrastructure or the cash to be able to guarantee the service of one of its business partners or of a third-party cloud service that its customer uses. Therefore, a hybrid SLA is something that the business itself will have to control by managing relationships with its service providers.