Top Cloud Storage providers Includes the following.
- Amazon
- ICloud
- Dropbox
- Box
- Google Drive
- sync
- MEGA
Best out of these is selected as per personal requirements of a
user.
Let’s look more into the SLA’s for Personal storage
providers.
Features of a SLA Contract
A SLA contract
- Codifies the specific parameters and minimum levels required
for each element of the service, as well as remedies for failure to
meet those requirements.
- Affirms your institution’s ownership of its data stored on the
service provider’s system, and specifies your rights to get it
back.
- Details the system infrastructure and security standards to be
maintained by the service provider, along with your rights to audit
their compliance.
- Specifies your rights and cost to continue and discontinue
using the service.
Criteria to select a cloud storage service provider
- Availability (e.g. 99.99% during work days, 99.9% for
nights/weekends)
- Performance (e.g. maximum response times)
- Security / privacy of the data (e.g. encrypting all stored and
transmitted data)
- Disaster Recovery expectations (e.g. worse case recovery
commitment)
- Location of the data (e.g. consistent with local
legislation)
- Access to the data (e.g. data retrievable from provider in
readable format)
- Portability of the data (e.g. ability to move data to a
different provider)
- Process to identify problems and resolution expectations (e.g.
call center)
- Change Management process (e.g. changes – updates or new
services)
- Dispute mediation process (e.g. escalation process,
consequences)
- Exit Strategy with expectations on the provider to ensure
smooth transition
With a core set of criteria established, the next step is to
evaluate the criticality of the cloud service and associated data.
Nearly any computing system can be made extremely reliable, but the
costs may be too high. Not every system needs the same degree of
reliability as NASA designed for the space shuttles, and few could
afford the costs.
For example, providing a read-only catalogue for customers is
fairly simple. While the catalogue may be very high value, it is
fairly easy to restore from backup with minimal customer impact.
However, if the same service has an online shopping with financial
transactions and customer data, then the risk level and also
importance to the business just increased. The nature of the
service is integral to determining the right SLA.
For every new cloud service, an SLA assessment process should be
done. The SLA is a living agreement though and as services change,
the SLA should be reassessed.
The SLA should act as a guide for handling potential problems.
We need to look at the SLA as a tool for protecting the stability
of the service, protecting the assets of the company and minimizing
the expense should drastic actions be required. As an example,
changing service providers and undoing the contracts in place,
should be a last resort; it’s a very expensive and painful
solution. Nonetheless, it needs to be covered in the SLA so that
both parties can disengage a lawsuit.
Lessons Learned from Past Incidents relating to clauses of
SLA’s
- Read your cloud provider’s SLA very carefully – The almost
four-day Amazon outage of April 2011 did not breach Amazon’s EC2
SLA, which as a FAQ explains, “guarantees 99.95% availability of
the service within a Region over a trailing 365 period.” Since it
has been the EBS and RDS services rather than EC2 itself that has
failed (and all the failures have been restricted to Availability
Zones within a single Region), the SLA has not been breached,
legally speaking.
- Get technical staff involved to validate SLAs against common
outage scenarios – Another set of outages come along to delight
those who follow Microsoft’s journey to cloud nirvana. On August 7
it was a power outage that affected their Dublin datacentre and
affected service to European users of Business Productivity Online
Services (BPOS).
- Have contingency plans in place to support worse case scenarios
– When we re-designed for the cloud this Amazon failure was exactly
the sort of issue that we wanted to be resilient to. Our
architecture avoids using EBS as our main data storage service, and
the Simple DB, S3 and Cassandra services that we do depend upon
were not affected by the outage.
As we have learned the various aspects of cloud service
providers, thus being in safer place we should not risk our
personal and professional information on a cloud storage that has
no SLA.