Can you achieve better service level agreements in cloud than on premise?

Whereas there is no longer any doubt that cloud computing is here to stay and has revolutionized how companies deliver and consume IT services, there are still questions over what workloads are appropriate for cloud.  Is cloud ready for truly mission-critical applications? If so, then the service level agreements (SLAs) need to be at least as good, if not better, than what companies can deliver in their own data centres. The current cloud mega-vendors all have SLAs for uptime, which is itself defined differently by the different vendors. However, those SLA are sometimes not met, and the penalties are by no means severe for missing the uptime target. As a result, many CIOs are still using cloud only for all their non-mission critical applications and workloads. On Tuesday at Oracle Open World, Oracle made a series of announcements that will give those CIOs cause to rethink.

The requirements for an SLA vary greatly from case to case, but applications need guarantees on security, performance and availability in some order of priority. Open World 2017 has placed a great deal of emphasis on data security and the increase global threat of cybercrime. Larry Ellison’s Sunday keynote focused on Oracle’s new Autonomous Database. On Tuesday, he continued that thread by announcing a new service in Oracle Management Cloud that further automates threat detection and remediation. The new service is able to monitor all software and infrastructure and detect – for example, if there is a patch missing from any element of the stack. It uses machine learning to find anomalies in the configuration and, if desired, automatically install a patch to avoid potential attacks that avail of that vulnerability.

Not all applications store sensitive information, and not all applications need this level of security automation.  For many applications, performance is the most important factor. Think of AI applications that need to crunch vast numbers of data, or web-scale apps that process millions of records per minute. In further announcements, Oracle and NVIDIA announced the imminent availability of Graphics Processing Units (GPU) on Oracle bare metal compute servers. This allows customers run those grunt-hungry applications in public cloud, without having to give away performance to virtualization or aging processors. All this will be delivered at the lowest price per performance in the industry. There is no longer a need sacrifice performance to use public cloud.

Finally, the third major service level attribute that users require is availability. With on-premise systems, IT has full control over the availability of applications. They can choose to implement simple high availability for hardware failures, or full disaster recovery with secondary data centres on different continents. As mentioned, cloud service levels on availability do not yet give companies sufficient confidence to run their entire business on public cloud. With Oracle’s next-generation cloud infrastructure, customers can take advantage of business continuity capabilities not available on other clouds. Whereas this is technically very impressive, the real news is that Oracle announced a series of service level agreements for application connectivity, availability, performance and hardware failure.  These SLAs are made possible by the underlying software-defined infrastructure and networking. Again, other clouds don’t yet do this.

At IT conferences, it is very easy to notice only the new sexy software and services that the vendor is eager to show. There is absolutely no shortage of new cool stuff being announced this week at Open World – every session presents a new service or capability available now or soon. The pace of Oracle’s innovation on cloud shows no signs of slowing.  However, customers need confidence in the fundamental platform before they will run on cloud the workloads that run their business. Oracle’s announcements this week are driving the industry to deliver better security, performance and availability on cloud. CIOs should demand more from their cloud vendors. They should ask if the vendor can meet their expectation for service levels. Oracle’s public cloud now delivers a level of service previously unavailable from any vendor, at a very aggressive price point. CIOs that hesitated before, now have something new to consider.