Development of SLA
Development of information technology allows using the applications of IT in order to minimize costs of the application implementation as well as bring solutions to the respective faster. In addition, the organizations turn to the third party outsourcing for various causes such as to minimize costs, maintenance as well as operations of help desk. One of the most important ingredients for successful relationship between application service providers and its customers is based on powerful service level agreement. Present report deals with the overview of service level agreement and development of SLA for Deorham Corporation. In order to develop SLA, Thor Cloud service focuses on the quality and service, requirements of auditor and the procedure of ensuring key functionalities works several fields like testing the data disaster system. Moreover, compliance with the requirements of legislation by the organization is discussed in the report.
A well-defined service level agreement records expectations for relationship as well as provides the target in order to target accurate measurement of the performance against the objectives (Hani et al. 2015). There are several areas that laid down the boundaries of the project for Deorham Corporation that can be included as followed,
- Standard service that can be measured
- Required functions by the customers need to be covered by application service provider
- Volume of work, which can be accepted as well as delivered
- Quality of the deliverables
- Possible actions if something are not correct
Hence, Thor Cloud services needs to develop the service level agreement by keeping in the mind those aspects and use proper methods to use the factors. In several cases, convoluted language in service level agreement makes the process complicated in order to measure compliance (Lu et al. 2016). The loopholes generally occur for obscuring clauses associated with availability, timing as well as performance. Hence, preparation of service level agreement needs careful analysis as well as consultation with the legal counsel.
Hiles and Hon (2016) stated that there are several categories of SLA metrics. One of the simplest methods for approaching several potential metrics of service level agreement is to make group them into categories. It helps to decide that which category is suitable and work best for Deorham Corporation. The key factors are managed with 15 major categories such as SLA document, methodology of SLA, process implementation, measurements of SLA, resources, penalties as well as innovation (Ikerionwu et al. 2014). In addition, system downtime as well as availability, volume of work, satisfaction of customers, effectiveness, sensitivity, implementation of SLA and outsourcing agreement.
In the present case scenario, Deorham Corporation is small software house and wants to develop specialist software suit for auctions. The software modules need to include antiques, cars, flower meat, cattle as well as fish auctions. The software is based on personal computers and MAC. However, it is required to develop apps for Apple and Android phones as well as tablets. In this perspective, the company wants to develop service level agreement with Thor Cloud services as it has in house development centre in Melbourne and outsource development overseas (Ren et al. 2016). The main purpose to develop service level agreement is make lower operating costs as well as considerations for making the outsourcing strategy and enhances security issues.
Sfondrini, Motta and You (2015) asserted that it is important to develop legal binding between Thor Cloud services and Deorham Corporation. The document needs to explain actual services and level of service with precise as well as straightforward detail regarding the services along with agreement. The procedure of service level management needs to explain the procedure of outsourcing that is used to support SLA document. Gorla and Somers (2014) mentioned that the procedures as well as methodologies are generally left for outsourcing organization in order to identify and ensure that the procedure as well as methodologies supports t the service level agreement with Thor Cloud services. However, it is recommended that Thor Cloud services and Deorham Corporation work together at the time of negotiating for SLA contract in order to eliminate misunderstanding regarding the procedure as well as method of support that can be helpful in management as well as reporting of the methods.
Methodology or Procedure of SLA
The methodology or procedure of SLA represents higher level solution for the issues as Well as best technology to be utilized in order to implement the specific system. The teams involved with the agreement and contracts as well as negotiation of cost are required to include in implementation of the procedure in order to ensure service level agreement between Thor Cloud services and Deorham Corporation is not broken by any party. In addition, some types of measurement need to be utilize in order to ensure that requirements of SLA are properly met. For an instance, in the help desk outsourcing as well as data need to be gathered either automatically or manually to report the management (Ravindran et al. 2015) Moreover, automatic data collection is better as recommendations for less labor-intensive reporting of service level agreement. However, there is no hard and fast rule in order to govern the measurements of parties including each of service level agreement. The approaches are required to involve in the work practice for developing service level agreement between Thor Cloud Service and Deorham Corporation.
The service level agreement need to be considered utilizing external or internal resources in dynamic way in order to encounter changing conditions of business. The objects are used seamlessly with mix of services, costs along with service provider for marketing of the solution at competitive market (García et al. 2017). One of the main objectives of Deorham Corporation is to store operation data in real time environment within Thor Cloud Service in order to outsource from operational viewpoint. In this situation, the service level agreement between Deorham Corporation and Thor Cloud Service need to consider the resources. However, it is very important to determine as well as prioritize functionalities of business from bad case to good case and needs measurement of the functionalities in dollars as well as percentage. The service level agreement between Thor Cloud Service and Deorham Corporation requires specifying the penalties, which would get attention of the customers. Innovation can bring services to the market faster. It is required to improve technology rapidly over time and terms at service level as well as conditions are need to be updated in periodic way in order to match standards of the industry.
McIvor (2016) commented that in outsourcing of Deorham Corporation, 100 % availability of the service has costs more than 98 %. All organizations require 100 % reliability. On the other hand, the service level agreement needs to request availability of the service in order to encounter specific requirements of Deorham Corporation like development of disaster cloud system, which contains cloud data of Deorham Corporation resulting recovery of data from disaster situation. On the other hand, it is required to comply with existing coding structures as well as Six Sigma and other industry standard along with quality metrics are most significant for categories of service level agreement that covers conformance of various documents and products as well as deliverables in order to collect if the quality is acceptable (Alruwaili and Gulliver 2014). Hence, Thor Cloud Service needs to use credible audit compliance along with assuring the quality.
Measurement of SLA
In order to match with the requirements, periodic surveys can be conducted by external as well as internal resources in order to ensure that the service provided by Thor Cloud Service is satisfactory to Deorham Corporation. The results of survey need to be checked against service level agreement for ensuring the agreement encounters the targets. On the other hand, sensitivity metrics can measure quality of the procedure as well as efficiency. Implementation of service level agreement between Thor Cloud Service and Deorham Corporation needs to be created to the practices as well as adjusting transactions of business. Final service level agreement is based on the SLA document of evaluator. Thus, it is required to have sections that can be added, removed as well as adjusted by negotiations (Gunasekaran et al. 2015). The agreements of outsourcing usually terminated for reasons upon the breach of materials like insufficient service level. Thus, clear language in service level agreement is important to be considered. However, setting minimum service level is helpful to allow the process of termination.
Conclusion
From the above discussion, it can be concluded that service level agreement is important for ensuring effective and efficient outsourcing engagement of Deorham Corporation. The metrics utilized for measuring as well as managing performance to service level agreements are heart of successful agreement as well as critical factors in getting long term success. On contrary, service level agreement requires experience. Implementation of the performance metrics can produce issues for the organizations for attempting in order to formulate service level agreement strategies as well as select the metrics required supporting the strategies. Therefore, it is required to take effective strategy for developing service level agreement for outsourcing between the organizations.
References
Alruwaili, F.F. and Gulliver, T.A., 2014. Secsla: A proactive and secure service level agreement framework for cloud services. International Journal of Cloud Computing and Services Science (IJ-CLOSER), 3(4), pp.189-198.
García, J.M., Fernández, P., Pedrinaci, C., Resinas, M., Cardoso, J. and Ruiz-Cortés, A., 2017. Modeling Service Level Agreements with Linked USDL Agreement. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 10(1), pp.52-65.
Gorla, N. and Somers, T.M., 2014. The impact of IT outsourcing on information systems success. Information & Management, 51(3), pp.320-335.
Gunasekaran, A., Irani, Z., Choy, K.L., Filippi, L. and Papadopoulos, T., 2015. Performance measures and metrics in outsourcing decisions: A review for research and applications. International Journal of Production Economics, 161, pp.153-166.
Hani, A.F.M., Paputungan, I.V. and Hassan, M.F., 2015. Renegotiation in service level agreement management for a cloud-based system. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 47(3), p.51.
Hiles, A. and Hon, F.B.C.I., 2016. E-Business Service Level Agreements: Strategies for Service Providers, E-Commerce and Outsourcing. Rothstein Publishing.
Ikerionwu, C., Foley, R., Gray, E. and Edgar, D., 2014. Business process outsourcing service providers’ perception of performance and performance measurement. Journal of Economics and Engineering, 5(2), pp.5-10.
Lu, K., Yahyapour, R., Wieder, P., Yaqub, E., Abdullah, M., Schloer, B. and Kotsokalis, C., 2016. Fault-tolerant Service Level Agreement lifecycle management in clouds using actor system. Future Generation Computer Systems, 54, pp.247-259.
McIvor, R., 2016. An analysis of the application of process improvement techniques in business process outsourcing. International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management, 33(3), pp.321-343.
Ravindran, K., Susarla, A., Mani, D. and Gurbaxani, V., 2015. Social capital and contract duration in buyer-supplier networks for information technology outsourcing. Information Systems Research, 26(2), pp.379-397.
Ren, Z.J., Zhang, F. and Feng, T., 2016. Service outsourcing: Capacity, quality and correlated costs.
Sfondrini, N., Motta, G. and You, L., 2015, April. Service level agreement (sla) in public cloud environments: A survey on the current enterprises adoption. In Information Science and Technology (ICIST), 2015 5th International Conference on (pp. 181-185). IEEE.
Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:
Turnitin Report
Formatting
Title Page
Citation
Outline
