Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

Creating a Hybrid Management SLA Dashboard

Regarding management of the SLA of a hybrid cloud environment, think in terms of a dashboard that allows you to have visibility into the combination of services and then the ability to detect which part of your hybrid environment is causing the problems.

Here is an example that might help you think about this issue: Imagine that you are in charge of managing a sales force. You have a direct sales force, a group of contract sales people, and a distributor that sell your products. You look at the overall performance of the entire hybrid sales organization, and you notice that sales are off by 25 percent from the prior month. What does this mean? Is everyone having problems? Instead of panicking, you take a look at each group. It turns out that the distributor was acquired by another company and the team that had been selling a lot of your products was reassigned to different accounts. In fact, when you take out the performance of the distributor, it’s clear that the rest of the sales organizations are outperforming previous months by a wide margin.

When downtime isn’t an outage (by SLA terms)

If an SLA states that a cloud vendor will be up for 99.999 percent of the time (trailing 365 days), you likely expect them to be down for around 5 minutes over the course of a year (5.256 minutes to be exact). When viewing the many 9s, outages might be far from your mind, but a close reading of your SLA is important in order to understand what an ...