4 Questions To Ask About Cloud Uptime

By Rob Curls, solutions consultant, Concerto Cloud Services

If your company has ever experienced a system outage, you understand the impact of downtime and its potential to disrupt your business as well as your bottom line. As more enterprises migrate their workloads to the cloud, it is a commonly held assumption that a service level agreement (SLA), whether for 99.9 percent uptime or higher, is sufficient for the needs of your organization.

This is not the case.

SLAs, which document the amount and type of allowed downtime for your platform, come in many iterations with the important stipulations of your cloud service often buried in the text. While it is critical for your company to understand your SLA terms of minutes and seconds of allowable downtime to determine acceptable risk for your application or workload, it is equally important to understand the nuances of an SLA’s terms to put the outlined figures into context.

SLAs can be challenging and difficult to understand for even the most experienced and technically-minded professionals. Here are four, often-overlooked questions to ask a potential cloud services provider to determine if a platform and its associated SLA is the right choice for you. Remember, SLAs are part of legal contracts so it is advisable to have a lawyer and/or a technical expert assist you in this process.

1.How do you calculate cloud availability?

• To begin, it is important to be aware you may not share the same definition or implications of downtime as your potential cloud services provider. For example, Microsoft Azure calculates downtime reimbursement based on a formula that subtracts downtime from the total user time available in a month. In practice, this formula means an enterprise with 100 users might have to be down for over 18 hours before receiving any type of SLA credit. When discussing the SLA with your provider, it is helpful to ask your potential provider to describe a few downtime and reimbursement scenarios.
• In addition, it is critical to understand how a cloud services provider tracks uptime and usage. Many offerings provide service availability and consumption dashboards that display real-time data on the cloud platform. Ask potential partners to schedule a demo or share examples of their reporting system to gain an understanding of how your SLA will be tracked, in addition to how easily these tools can be accessed and managed by members of your team.

2.What is the uptime guarantee and is the SLA stacked?

• Today, most providers in the cloud computing market provide a guarantee of over 95 percent uptime. While this may sound good at first glance, the devil is often in the details. A necessary question to ask a potential cloud provider about the SLA is whether the uptime guarantee is all-inclusive or by component. Providers often stack their uptime platform segment, meaning if one cloud component is down and the others are still operational, they may not recognize this as downtime, even if for all intents and purposes the cloud platform is not functional.

3.What kind of recovery time and support is promised?

• When choosing between cloud providers and reviewing SLAs, it is easy to focus solely on the technical details of cloud performance and compliance demands. However, it is important to understand the service commitments attached to a cloud platform. If you experience an outage, how quickly will your provider respond? In the event your system goes down or if there is a challenge, how quickly can service be restored?
• Another factor to consider is the level of support a service provider guarantees. Many public cloud providers, like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, offer a support toolkit with limited customization and technical support. This self-serve approach assumes your organization’s IT department is equipped with the resources and knowledge necessary to manage a cloud environment. On the other hand, a fully managed cloud services provider can provide around the clock support to ensure your company’s migration and operations in the cloud goes smoothly.

4.What if we decide to cancel the service?

• For any number of reasons — such as less than satisfactory performance, poor customer support, or weak uptime — you may cancel the cloud services provider relationship. As with any contract, it is important to review the termination clauses carefully and to avoid committing to disadvantageous terms, such as high early termination fees, disputes over data ownership, or narrow terms of renewal.
• Your SLA should also outline how the cloud provider will help you migrate your data off of its platform — whether to another services provider or to an on-premise data center — to ensure the transfer is successful and that your organization experiences minimal downtime as a result of the transition.