Service-level agreement

About: Service-level agreement is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4358 publications have been published within this topic receiving 75333 citations. The topic is also known as: SLA.

Inventory Allocation in the Presence of Service‐Level Agreements

Abstract: Retailers often use service-level agreements (SLAs) to evaluate their supplier's performance. Based on an examination of 70 SLAs from practice, we conclude that in terms of evaluating fill rate, these SLAs vary in at least three key dimensions: (i) Supplier performance can be evaluated for each demand request or over some longer horizon, (ii) the acceptable fill rate can be 100% or something less than 100%, and (iii) the non-compliance charge can be a flat fee, a per-unit-short fee, or both. For a supplier operating a periodic-review inventory system and serving multiple retailers, each with an SLA, we investigate the impact of inventory allocation rules on SLA compliance and expected non-compliance costs across the three dimensions of review horizon, fill rate target and non-compliance cost structure. We derive several analytic results when retailers are symmetric. For the single-period setting and a fill rate target of 100%, we characterize the optimal allocation rule and rank other rules common in practice and the literature. We also characterize the optimal rule for the single-period setting when the fill rate target is less than 100% and the SLA specifies a flat-fee non-compliance charge. In the multiple-period case, we characterize the optimal rule when the fill rate target is 100%. When the fill rate target is less than 100% and the performance review horizon is more than one period, we develop a simple heuristic that outperforms common allocation rules.

Quality of service enabled database applications

Abstract: In today's enterprise service oriented software architectures, database systems are a crucial component for the quality of service (QoS) management between customers and service providers. The database workload consists of requests stemming from many different service classes, each of which has a dedicated service level agreement (SLA). We present an adaptive QoS management that is based on an economic model which adaptively penalizes individual requests depending on the SLA and the current degree of SLA conformance that the particular service class exhibits. For deriving the adaptive penalty of individual requests, our model differentiates between opportunity costs for underachieving an SLA threshold and marginal gains for (re-)achieving an SLA threshold. Based on the penalties, we develop a database component which schedules requests depending on their deadline and their associated penalty. We report experiments of our operational system to demonstrate the effectiveness of the adaptive QoS management.

Risk-based Confidentiality Requirements Specification for Outsourced IT Systems

Abstract: Today, companies are required to be in control of their IT assets, and to provide proof of this in the form of independent IT audit reports. However, many companies have outsourced various parts of their IT systems to other companies, which potentially threatens the control they have of their IT assets. To provide proof of being in control of outsourced IT systems, the outsourcing client and outsourcing provider need a written service level agreement (SLA) that can be audited by an independent party. SLAs for availability and response time are common practice in business, but so far there is no practical method for specifying confidentiality requirements in an SLA. Specifying confidentiality requirements is hard because in contrast to availability and response time, confidentiality incidents cannot be monitored: attackers who breach confidentiality try to do this unobserved by both client and provider. In addition, providers usually do not want to reveal their own infrastructure to the client for monitoring or risk assessment. Elsewhere, we have presented an architecture-based method for confidentiality risk assessment in IT outsourcing. In this paper, we adapt this method to confidentiality requirements specification, and present a case study to evaluate this new method.

Service level agreement (SLA) in Public Cloud environments: A Survey on the current enterprises adoption

Abstract: In recent past, organizations have purchased IT equipment to be installed and directly managed within their own Data Centres. The rise of Cloud Computing generated an important shift of focus from the private boundaries of the companies to a new golden era of IT outsourcing. To analyse the quality of the services available on the market we conducted a survey based upon 58 IT professionals who have migrated critical business applications to the Public Cloud. The survey has been carried on to highlight the security policies, the minimum performance warranted by the Cloud providers and the presence of monitoring tools which allow to the customers a direct control on the deployed services. The study shows that the SLAs offered by Public Cloud Providers are not able to properly address the needs of the customers ensuring a low degree of control and a lack of transparency on the actual performance of the services.