Google is making an extraordinary promise Google App users: no more scheduled downtime for maintenance in their service level agreements. Any downtime is counted and applied to the customer’s SLA - the first major cloud provider to eliminate maintenance windows from its SLA, Google proudly points out in a blog post. Google is also amending its SLA so that any intermittent downtime is counted - compared with its earlier policy in which a period of less than ten minutes was not included.

Paving the Way

Google may well be setting a new standard for applications provided through the cloud. Most do offer 99% uptime - but in some cases even that is not enough. Certain industries, such as healthcare for example, might find even that window too risky.

For companies that are building their IT operations on a cloud infrastructure the following should be negotiated in a SLA, according to the E-Commerce Times:

• Make sure the services are based on open standards - in other words, don't allow yourself to be locked into a proprietary platform.

• Remedies, namely credit, should be associated with each SLA, and these should escalate depending on the extent of the failure. Also, all credits should be given automatically, without the the customer having to jump through hopes for them to be applied.

• Repeated failures should give the customer the legal right to terminate an agreement.