The need for application SLAs
A new opportunity for service providers to increase market share, revenues and profits. Enterprises are looking today at consistent end-to-end application performance guarantees. Central to many business applications, the WAN is a crucial component need to achieve that goal. Service providers must therefore offer some guarantees in terms of the performance of applications running over the WAN. Offering such guarantees is the role of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that are defined between the service providers and the enterprises. But typical network services SLAs are not directly linked to the performance of business critical applications. This paper takes a look at existing network SLAs and explains why they are not providing a complete answer to modern enterprises performance challenges. It defines the key requirements that need to be considered when putting in place application-centric SLAs. Finally, it outlines the key concepts behind Ipanema’s application-centric SLA framework.