Service levels and infrastructure blueprints will determine five key service qualities for the solution; availability, performance, security, management, and recoverability.

The following example is a very basic (Gold, Silver, Bronze) service differentiator. Adapt the example to suit the service level agreement (SLA) offerings by a service provider.

 

Many cloud service providers offer uptime guarantees as part of their SLA. While the usage of uptime percentages for cloud providers are common, such as 99.99% (approximately 52 minutes a year downtime), it is the ability to recover from an unexpected failure within a maximum RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) priority value that matters.

In order to meet very strict RTO priorities of < 1 hour, there must be no single points of failure in the physical infrastructure or software components. Cloud Pod Architecture (See page 17) takes advantage of two or more Pod implementations that can be geographically separated to solve disaster recovery challenges. This is reflected in the Gold service level described below.

Information security is often overlooked when SLAs are defined, however, many desktop environments are subject to strict security governance and compliance no matter how small or large the environment. Offering the digital workspace to enterprise tenants needs to be secure, both in connectivity and data storage requirements. Components such as NSX, SSL Certificates, and 2-Factor Authentication are mentioned here. However, other security areas that service providers may be subject to as part of the SLA include: Penetration and vulnerability testing, auditing, configuration and change management, forensics, and information impact levels.