Recommendations for enterprise service SLA guidance in the DoD

A fundamental concept of the Department of Defense´s (DoD´s) vision for a net-centric environment includes the establishment of shared services to support the development and operation of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) - based capabilities. In this environment, data producers and capability providers supply data and capabilities to the enterprise through a service paradigm. This vision embraces a common infrastructure, interoperability of capabilities, services that represent reusable building blocks, and coordinated management providing Situational Awareness (SA) of the environment. As a result of this vision, the DoD is developing and acquiring Enterprise Services (ES), resulting in a situation where services are supplied to end-users by two types of providers: Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Government Application Service Providers (GASPs). Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) are an essential element of the service paradigm in this context. Consequently, it is necessary that recommendations for guidance on sufficient and effective SLAs be developed to help ensure the success of programs developing or acquiring ESs as well as the success of the net-centric vision itself. The content of this paper is drawn from a MITRE study, sponsored by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks & Information Integration (ASD/NII). The study provides recommendations for guidance on ES SLAs. The study contains an ES SLA Management Framework and a Notional SLA Needs Framework. It provides recommendations on the necessary components or elements of an ES SLA, such as the boundary of control, provider and customer responsibilities, metrics, consumer characterizations, and End-to-End (E2E) solutions. This paper discusses the most significant recommendations resulting from the initial MITRE study on ES SLAs.