A standardized and automated system needs to be in place to track, trace, and audit all aspects of performance. For example, bandwidth, connectivity, and scalability are all performance characteristics that should be monitored. In addition, automated systems should be designed to quickly identify the root cause of the hardware or software failures so performance can be restored. 

These systems should answer questions such as 

✓ Is the cloud infrastructure performing as expected? 

✓ Are identified performance problems occurring randomly at regular intervals? 

✓ Which performance problems are most severe and need to be given top priority to find the root cause and resolve the issue? 

✓ How can performance be improved? 

Monitoring must include the ability to quickly respond to dramatic or unexpected performance fluctuations, especially as a result of malicious activities. Authorized users need visibility into your public, private, and/or hybrid cloud environments. 

A service level agreement  (SLA) is a document that captures the understanding between a service user and service provider that defines uptime, availability, and performance. The SLA is also a contractual agreement between the participants in a service delivery contract. In the world of computing, an SLA is typically written based on the expectation that a system could be operational 99.99 percent of the month. It may also specify 

## Defining SLAs 

that the service provider’s help desk will respond to an outage in a set amount of time. Also, the service provider is expected not to share a company’s information with anyone and that data will be preserved for a set period of time and backed up regularly. In a complex hybrid cloud environment, managing SLAs of all the relationships of all cloud services a company may be dependent on can get complicated. 

