How does your organization monitor cloud SLAs?
Answers
We use services where the SLA's are monitored by the vendor (email, Instant messaging, document management,
In general, if you have solutions for which SLA's are critical, you should either develop a custom relationship with your vendor (most vendors offer a standard SLA 'package' such as 99.9% uptime) OR consider implementing the solution on-premise.
(Disclosure: we are a cloud vendor) Get your legal team to look at the SLA and discover 'gaps'. Address these gaps up front with the vendor. Like Donald mentions, find out parameters that are important to you and develop a custom SLA with the vendor. Many vendors will entertain that.
FWIW, typical areas to look for in a cloud SLA are - security, encryption, data retention, data retrieval, uptime/downtime, response periods, backups, maintenance etc. Also, if it is a mission critical application, some vendors will even provide a weekly status report so that you have metrics on performance.