Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
'position' of each party in the relationship, i.e. the duties, liabilities, remedies, etc.
of each contractor will be stated in the agreement and each party will be bound to
respect the obligations contained there. The agreement that plays a pivotal role in a
Grid and Cloud scenario is the SLA, which can be defined as “a part of the contract
between the service provider and its customers. It describes the provider's commit-
ments and specifies penalties if those commitments are not met” (Leff et al. 2003).
As said above, and as frequently happens in the practice, the Grid/Cloud provider
and the customer can 'concentrate' all the provisions that will govern their relation-
ship in the SLA or enter into more than one agreement. The SLA will be focused on
the most relevant technical specifications linked to the provision of the service, and
one of its main goals will be to define the quality of the service (QoS) promised by
the supplier. QoS means, more specifically, the availability and performance levels,
in other words the level of performance guaranteed (it will be showed
infra
to what
extent) by the provider.
All other clauses regarding liability, warranties, confidentiality, etc may
be included in another contract (that can be called, for instance, the Customer
Agreement), and this is often the case in point with big international Grid/Cloud
computing and storage capacity providers. Nevertheless, the reader should be
aware that in practice many combinations are possible, e.g. the provision about
fees can be included in the Customer Agreement, while liabilities may be regu-
lated by the SLA. The names of the agreements are not really relevant to the ends
of our analysis: what is pivotal is the content of some sensitive clauses and the fact
that the agreements made by the parties must be legally valid and enforceable. We
illustrate this point with an example that involves two imaginary European compa-
nies:
SuperICTResources
, a German technology provider, and
SaaSforyou
, a Dutch
customer/SaaS provider. If we assume that they negotiate the content of their agree-
ment, we see that it is probably easier for them to have a unique contract (or SLA)
instead of a plurality of agreements, unless this is necessary or useful in light of the
specific situations and needs of the parties. Especially if more services are involved,
it may be convenient to draft a frame agreement, aimed to regulate the overall rela-
tionships, and many SLAs tailored to the specific service provisions.
From a different perspective, it is important to point out the distinction - which
is relevant from the legal point of view, in relation to the negotiation of contracts and
therefore the content of the contractual provisions - between (i) agreements negoti-
ated on a case-by-case basis by the parties (like in the case of
SuperICTResources
and
SaaSforyou
) and (ii) agreements drafted unilaterally by the Grid/Cloud provider
and imposed to the client (e.g. if
SaaSforyou
buys Grid or Cloud capacity from
Amazon, Sun, etc). In the latter case, the customer, if he wants to buy the services
of the provider, can only accept the SLA and the other agreements proposed by the
supplier, with no possibility to change or amend the content of the provisions. In this
regard, it is unrealistic to expect a big provider, like for instance Amazon, Sun, etc,
to negotiate every agreement with its clients because of the high costs of negotia-
tions and the risks of inefficiency linked to this.
Therefore, given the fact, that “a key goal of Grid computing is to deliver manage-
ment on top of the allocated resources which include for example availability of
