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SLA Design and Service Provisioning for Outsourced Services

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Abstract

In this work, a business-driven approach to designing Service Level Agreements in an e-commerce environment is proposed. In contrast to conventional SLA design approaches, the one proposed better captures the relationship between service provider and service client by considering the negative business impact (business loss) originated from IT infrastructure failures and performance degradation and introduces such knowledge into the SLA itself. A complete example scenario shows the value of the proposed approach. A main conclusion is that the SLA established using the business-driven perspective is superior to the one based on a conventional approach since both service provider and client can simultaneously obtain higher profit.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge and thank the Bottom Line Project team—special thanks to Rodrigo Rebouças—for their support and discussions. This work was developed in collaboration with HP Brazil R&D.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Unidade de Desenvolvimento de Software da Paraíba—UDPB, Empresa de Tecnologia e Informações da Previdência Social—DATAPREV, João Pessoa, Brazil

    Filipe T. Marques

  2. Department of Systems and Computing—DSC, Federal University of Campina Grande—UFCG, A.v Aprígio Veloso, 882, 58109-970, Campina Grande, PB, Brazil

    Jacques P. Sauvé & J. Antão B. Moura

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  1. Filipe T. Marques
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  2. Jacques P. Sauvé
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  3. J. Antão B. Moura
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Correspondence to Jacques P. Sauvé.

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Marques, F.T., Sauvé, J.P. & Moura, J.A.B. SLA Design and Service Provisioning for Outsourced Services. J Netw Syst Manage 17, 73–90 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-009-9115-7

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