An integrated framework for e-commerce cloud service level agreement

Abstract

Cloud computing recently became the key element of providing services via the internet. Cloud technology is new paradigm of computing where available computing resources are delivered as a service. These resources are generally offered under the concept of pay-as-you-use. Nowadays, some of e-commerce companies move to Cloud services. Cloud offers positive opportunities for ecommerce companies which are looking for more flexible and scalable infrastructure, to sell products and services to customers. As more and more e-commerce companies delegate their task to cloud providers, Services Level Agreement (SLA) became an important aspect between the e-commerce seller and cloud provider to protect end user, the dynamic nature of cloud computing needs to continue monitoring of the services. In this paper we propose a SLA framework based on Web services level agreement (WSLA) which is introduced by IBM. The framework integrated with nine parameters that verified and validated based on end user perspective. Data were collected from 105 students in University Technology Malaysia. Factor analysis has been used to minimize the redundancy between the parameters and grouped based on the inter correlation between them. The results indicate that all nine parameters are significant and important from end user point view. An e-commerce cloud SLA document designed and run time parameters defined using XML language. Adopting these parameters by ecommerce seller catalyze better protection to the end users during contracting with cloud services providers.