Project offerings 2011

Project supervised by Joseph Davis

Standards for Cloud-Related Service Level Agreements
Service level agreements (SLAs) are contractual agreements between providers and customers that specify the level of service expected against a set of specific measures and the penalties associated with failures. There is growing consensus that one of the key impediments to wider migration to cloud-based services is the absence of well-defined SLAs and generally accepted standards for cloud service performance. The proposed project will involve empirical research to achieve the following goals:

1. A comprehensive survey of cloud providers ( infrastructure, platform etc.) to document, aggregate, and classify the terms, conditions, and contents of SLAs,
2. Surveying a sample of cloud providers to develop a comprehensive understanding of the problems, challenges, and obstacles faced by diverse classes of cloud service customers,
3. Based on 1) and 2), to develop a preliminary model cloud services that can contribute towards standards for cloud-related SLAs.