SNW Europe 2011: Better SLAs through 'people power'

Large vendors might like to think they have control of the cloud industry but it is people power from the customers that will push forward standards and, in turn, adoption.

This is belief of two senior members of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Europe. Speaking to Cloud Pro today at the SNW Europe 2011 conference in Frankfurt, Bob Plumridge – chairman – and Chris Sopp – director – said issues around cloud computing contracts were big concerns for customers.

“There is certainly a big concern [about security] and perhaps it still is number one, but I am starting to get the impression that when you are talking about public clouds and people outsourcing some of their stuff, what they are starting to get really concerned about is how do they move any of it if they don’t like the service provider in a year’s time,” Plumridge told Cloud Pro.

“Potentially you could have outsourced 4PB of storage, which is huge, and you and the service provider fall out because they are constantly missing service levels or they go out of business, which has already happened in the Netherlands. Suddenly I [need] to move this 4PB of storage from these people I don’t like to their biggest competitor. How the hell am I going to do that?”

He added: “At the same time they need to run their business with no outages to any of their applications because if there are outages… you can’t run.”

Sopp said these elements made the contract and SLAs “very, very important,” but his concern was more for the small and medium business (SMB) market, which is embracing cloud at a faster rate than large enterprises.

“I think a lot of customers I am talking to [in his role at HP] are dipping their toe… and a lot of them have still got the capability of managing that in-house [so] if the relationship does break down, it isn’t a major issue,” he said.

“The real concern I have is for the smaller companies that are saying [to cloud providers] yes, this is fine, take the 4PB.”

Plumridge agreed, adding: “If you are a big organisation, if you are Barclays Bank, HSBC or Ford, or somebody like that you have teams of internal lawyers who will go through these contracts with a fine toothcomb and make sure they are absolutely rock solid.”

“If you are somebody building break-pads for Mercedes and you are a 100 person organisation, you don’t have a legal team so you either go outside and pay a fortune for them or you just agree to the standard terms and conditions – If you [do the latter] you have lost.”

The key to making sure customers get the right SLAs and contracts is education, both claimed, so if the user is armed with all the information around the technology, it can make cloud providers dance to their tune.

This people power will ensure better contracts for everyone, according to Plumridge.