Hybrid Cloud SLAs for Industry 4.0: Bridging the Gap

Abstract

Hybrid Cloud Service Level Agreements (SLA) comprises of the legal terms and conditions for the cloud contract. Even though all the service level objectives, metrics and service descriptions are clearly outlined in the cloud SLA contract, sometimes vendors fail to meet the promised services and confusing terms lead to tenant-vendor cloud legal battles. Hybrid Cloud involves two different cloud models (public and private) working together, applications running under the hybrid cloud are subject to different availability sets, functionality and parameters developing SLA complexity and ambiguity. The new manufacturing environment (Industry 4.0 concept) is based on a fully connected, intelligent and automated factory, which will highly be dependent on cloud computing and IoT-based solutions for data analytics, storage and computational needs. In situations where Hybrid cloud services are not defined and managed properly may result in Industrial-IoT data security issues leading to financial and data losses. This paper discusses various aspects of the cloud service level agreement in Industry 4.0 for better understanding and implementation and puts a light on the issues that arise out of imprecise statements.

Integrated Design and Development of Intelligent Scenic Area Rural Tourism Information Service Based on Hybrid Cloud

“…At this stage, enterprises usually use three types of computing resources, namely, dedicated server resources running in enterprise data, virtual resource pools established on the basis of private clouds in enterprise data centers, and computing resources provided by public cloud providers [ 22 ]. For these three different types of enterprise computing resources, it is less cost-effective to use a private cloud that consumes a lot of resources to run enterprise applications that would be more efficiently run on a public cloud platform, but some enterprise-critical applications must be run in a private cloud environment.…”

Deployment Archetypes for Cloud Applications

“…-Failover to boost overall application availability [30] when on-premises application is unhealthy [1]. • Data replication is also being supported between Cloud and on-premises.…”

“…The hybrid application is then built using the desired regional with failover deployment archetype, using cross cloud autoscaling [19], multi-regional or global deployment archetypes. As enterprises bring critical workloads to public clouds, multi-tenancy of public clouds and single tenancy of on-premises can create SLA challenges for overall hybrid deployment as discussed in Reference [30].…”

Industrial IoT, Cyber Threats, and Standards Landscape: Evaluation and Roadmap

“…Industrial IoT (IIoT)/Industry 4.0 (I4.0) [ 1 ] is a concept of an innovative and intelligent fully connected factory implementing disruptive technologies (i.e., IoT, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, etc.) and innovative solutions (IIoT, automation, monitoring, etc.)…”

“…A fully connected factory involves different applications, services, communication models, and cloud structures. Service level agreements [ 1 ] are of high importance for assessing, aligning, and controlling the security, privacy, and quality of service (QoS) metrics associated with the I4.0 environment. Situations where SLAs are not assessed and monitored properly may lead to unexpected service disruption, downtime, and third-party subcontracting vendor issues [ 4 ].…”