Holding providers accountable
As cloud capacity challenges continue to emerge, enterprises must reassess how they engage with public cloud providers. The first step is a renewed focus on service-level agreements (SLAs). For years, SLAs have served as a measure of trust between cloud providers and their customers. These agreements outline performance metrics such as uptime, latency, and response times. However, metrics like “available capacity” or “scalability thresholds” are rarely addressed explicitly in standard contracts, leaving enterprises without a clear recourse when capacity issues arise.
Enterprises should revisit their SLAs and consider stricter requirements. A well-drafted SLA should include clauses that address failure to allocate resources and enforceable commitments related to scalability, geographic availability, and redundancy. Compensation for falling short of these guarantees must also be outlined, whether in the form of monetary payments, service credits, or some combination.
Enterprises should also insist on telemetry visibility: consistent, clear insights into cloud resource usage and availability. Monitoring tools alone aren’t enough if the cloud provider does not transparently communicate overall capacity trends and projected constraints. Customers using the Azure East US region, for instance, would have greatly benefited from earlier warnings that demand in certain instance classes was exceeding availability. Microsoft suggested using alternative instance types or migrating workloads to East US 2, but many enterprises learned of these options far too late, after their operations had already been disrupted.
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