Service-level agreements for cloud services are, at their core, more challenging than other SLAs because many cloud providers are unwilling to modify or adjust them. They want a relationship of “one to many,” with the same SLAs applicable to all of their customers.

That works out well for the cloud providers, but not for their customers.

Worse, many cloud providers’ SLAs are “cupcakes,” extremely weak and nearly worthless. In some cases, it can take a catastrophic outage of immense proportions for any remedies to be invoked (and the remedies aren’t so great either!).

You probably can’t negotiate changes to every cloud SLA, but you should at a minimum understand each SLA’s potential impact on your business. To assess the strength of your cloud SLAs and their inherent risks, compare them to these SLA elements:

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