Enterprise customers have long demanded service-level agreements (SLAs) from their telecom and cloud providers. These SLAs set the parameters of quality of service (QoS) and network or application dependability. Now that many enterprises are building private or hybrid clouds, they are finding benefits in establishing internal SLAs that set similar accountability rules for the IT team.

External service-level agreements in public cloud computing span the cloud and establish a clear set of expectations between customers, vendors, network service providers and other organizations involved.

In an internal SLA, the IT organization often must establish best practices and rules that stretch across the private and public cloud. For example, an IT organization might put its own private