SLALOM’s Cloud contract initiative ends as a major step forward for Cloud industry
The SLALOM initiative was launched in January 2015 with support from the European Commission by a group of consultants from global service provider Atos, the legal specialist Bird and Bird, researchers from the National Technical University of Athens and University of Pireaeus, and the Cloud Industry Forum, an industry body championing transparency and trust of online services. A number of key stakeholders at a European and international level organizations, including ISO (International Standardization Organisation), have been involved in the initiative, and after much discussion and a public consultation, SLALOM has published its recommendations and models. SLALOM shares its three final products that together provide ready to use insights on Cloud Contracts and Service Level Agreement (SLA). The SLALOM SLA Legal Contract Model and the SLALOM SLA Technical Specifications refer to the legal reference model and the technical SLA metric specification, which acts as a baseline with our template documents considering ISO standards that address technical and legal aspects. Both have been designed to provide a starting point for new contracts or be used as a benchmark for comparing existing ones and, critically, it can be modified in line with the specific requirements of cloud service providers and end users. To help the community, the project has also made available a number of guidance materials which are intended to help taking a more practical approach by offering insights on how to adopt SLALOM outcomes. All are accessible for free at http://slalom-project.eu/downloads. Daniel Field, SLALOM Coordinator and Head of IT Sector, Atos Research and Development, commented: “SLALOM has proven itself to be of value to the cloud computing market. Harmonising the ‘behind the scenes’ issues of the value chain lead to greater flexibility for users, resellers and aggregators, driving innovation. The reduced complexity and increased transparency will drive confidence in the market, and hence uptake. SLALOM has also demonstrated value in bringing together the research and commercial communities”. Moreover, “Atos is proud of the achievements of the project and will play an active role in the efforts to further develop and promote the results”, he concluded. All its members have also committed to continue the work of this initiative in the future with the constitution of SLALOM Body, which has the objective to continue the joint promotion within the Cloud ecosystem and continue with the evolution of SLALOM products to continue educating the cloud market and trying to reduce barriers and improve the cloud SLA market ecosystem with its practical, fair and balanced approach for Cloud SLAs, while being a support vehicle for individual members of the consortium in their individual exploitation intentions for SLALOM outcomes. Cloud, IT-related or legal companies; cloud adopters and cloud providers and any related group or association; and research institutions with interests on Cloud SLAs are welcome to participate in the initiative in the future as full members (http://slalom-project.eu/content/contact). About SLALOM The SLALOM initiative is backed and funded by the European Commission and the first stage is financed through the H2020 programme, running for 18 months with a budget of 700,000 Euros, under grant agreement No 644270. To find out more about SLALOM, visit: http://slalom-project.eu/: - Download SLALOM final products http://slalom-project.eu/downloads - Contact SLALOM team http://slalom-project.eu/conten
Keywords
Cloud, Service Level agreement, contracts
Countries
Greece, Spain, Italy, United Kingdom