Abstract

Nowadays companies outsource a lot of their IT resources and capabilities by contracting them with external IT providers. The agreements between providers and customers concerning different quality aspects of the contracted services such as availability, maintainability, security and continuity are formalized through Server Level Agreements (SLAs). One of the most important quality aspects and, at the same time, most difficult to agree is the availability level to be reached. Indeed, the process, methods and types of inputs used by providers and customers to calculate this level are still very informal and in many cases the resulting availability target is not suited to the customer requirements and the provider capabilities. In this boarder, this work presents a survey aimed at identifying and analysing the research literature to analyse what are the most used inputs and methods for availability calculation and prediction as wells as to analyse their applicability in the industry.

Share

COinS