Service Level Agreement as an Instrument to Enhance Trust in Cloud Computing - An Analysis of Infrastructure-as-a-Service Providers

We analyze service level agreements (SLAs) for cloud computing services, in particular SLAs published by infrastructure-asa-service (IaaS) providers on their websites. The rationale is to investigate the potential and actual roles of SLAs as trustenhancing instruments. Cloud computing is still not as widespread as it could be, because many decision makers do not sufficiently trust the technology or the providers, and hence are skeptical about adopting it. Enhancing trust could significantly advance cloud computing. We discuss the main aspects of trust as well as typical characteristics described in SLAs. Following this, a study of actual service level agreements offered by IaaS providers and published on their websites is presented. One of the findings is that at present only a few providers exploit the full potential of SLAs as trust-enhancing instruments.

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