Service Level Agreement Design and Service Provisioning for Outsourced Services

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 linkage between service provider and service client by considering the negative business impact (business loss) originated from IT infrastructure failures and performance degradation and factors 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 using a conventional approach since both service provider and client can simultaneously obtain higher profit.