Question

Discuss the most important quality metrics used in expressing SLAs. Also, discuss what are the best practices and guidelines for working with SLAs from the cloud consumer perspective.

Answer 1

Discussion about the most important quality metrics used in expressing SLAs:
There are many quality metrics used in expressing SLAs. However, the most important and absolutely necessary categories of quality metrics in expressing SLAs are:
* Volume of work.
* Quality of work.
* Responsiveness.
* Efficiency.

* Quality of work SLA metrics:
This comes underperformance indicator metrics.
* Availability: It is the availability of the applications, services, and systems.
* Performance: It is the performance of the applications, services, and systems.
* Appropriateness of the applications to their daily job.
* Service response time by priority: It is the reactive service response time by call priority.
* Time to resolve by priority.
* Other measurable SLA parameters.
* Problem resolution goals or Mean time to repair (MTTR).
* Problem escalation time.

In general,
* Quality positivity which is the percentage of deliverables accepted.
* Quality negativity which is the percentage of deliverables rejected.
* Service availability: It is the time when the stated service is available to be used.
* Customer satisfaction (CSAT): It is the measure of percentage of surveys filled by the customers providing feedback, suggestions, advice, ideas, complaints, etc either, positively, negatively, or neutrally either, on the customer service representative's support service to the customer or the product or service the company is offering, or sometimes the company itself.
* Service Level: It is the measure of time on how long it takes to respond to customers once they’re in the queue through telephone, chat or email.
* Average Speed of Answer (ASA): It is the measure of time on how long it takes, on average, for the customer support representative to respond to customers when they are in the queue.
* Abandonment Rate: It is the percentage or rate of the customers abandoning the contact, call, email, ticket, or chat they created, made, or initiated, got frustrated, gave up, and left before a support representative got to them.
* First Contact Resolution (FCR): It is calculated in percentage of the number of tickets resolved on the very first customer interaction.
* Net Promoter Score (NPS): It is the number for the company to know how likely the customer would recommend their company to a friend or colleague figuring out the promoters, passives, and detractors.

Discussion about what the best practices and guidelines are for working with SLAs from the cloud consumer perspective:
Below are the availability and response time metrics:
* Metric name in SLA.
* Constraints.
* Method and frequency of collection.

A cloud computing platform should provide the below metrics in general:
* Quality of Service (QoS).
* Security features.
* Availability.
* Reliability.
* Regulatory and compliance.
However, there are many other metrics which the cloud service providers offer.

As the best practices and guidelines for working with SLAs from the cloud consumer perspective, customers must first perform strategic
steps such as to develop a detailed business case and strategy, select cloud service and deployment models, etc., detailed in the practical guide to Cloud Computing. There should be a strategic analysis as a prerequisite to be taken and chosen by cloud customers to evaluate CSA (Cloud Service Agreements) to compare multiple cloud providers in the market or to negotiate terms with a selected cloud service provider.
The steps, guidelines, or practices are:
1. Customer should understand roles and responsibilities to understand who is responsible for which activities ensuring there are no misunderstandings, or gaps leading to problems using cloud services.

2. Should evaluate business level policies: Customers are required to consider the policy and compliance requirements relevant to them when reviewing a CSA as there are interdependencies between the policies expressed in the CSA and the business strategy and policies developed across the lines of business.

3. They should understand service and deployment model differences: Customers should understand Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) service models and Private (On-site), Private (Outsourced), Public, and Hybrid deployment models.
4. Should be able to identify critical performance objectives: Cloud customers must decide which availability, response time and processing speed, and other performance and system quality perspectives measures are most critical to their specific cloud environments and ensure these measures are included in their SLA.

And below are the other practices and guidelines the customers should be aware of and follow to use, exploit, and leverage cloud services effectively.
5. Evaluate security and privacy requirements.
6. Identify service management requirements.
7. Prepare for service failure management.
8. Understand the disaster recovery plan.
9. Develop an effective governance process.
10. Understand the exit process.