When we wrote last week about “4 Tools for Assessing Cloud Performance,” we asked for suggestions about other resources that can help companies monitor and evaluate cloud services. And we asked for suggestions as to what factors, in addition to cost and performance, might be important to weigh when making business decisions.
Jeffrey Abbott, Senior Product Marketing Manager in the Cloud Customer Solutions Unit at CA Technologies wrote a blog post in response: “Comparing the Relative Quality of Cloud Services – Is a single metric enough?” In it, he argues that not only are one or two variables insufficient, but that different parameters matter to different people. As such, a more robust index to evaluate cloud services needs to be developed.
CA Technologies started work on such a project, which has now been handed over to Carnegie Mellon University so that it can be an independent tool built not by one vendor but by a broader online community.
Cloud Commons and the Service Measurement Index
The Service Measurement Index (SMI) is a method designed to measure the end-to-end customer experience for any number of cloud services. The SMI will allow organizations to evaluate any number of IT services available to them, regardless of whether those services are provide internally or sourced to outside companies. The index measures services on six metrics, including quality, agility, risk, cost, capability, and security.
And it allows users to weight the importance of these different factors, depending on their definitions of what constitutes “good service.” After all, for some companies, cost is no option. For others, cost may be the key. The SMI, hopes Abbott, will allow businesses to compare “apples to apples” when making IT decisions.
Launched in May of this year, the SMI and the Cloud Commons that supports it are fairly new projects. The index tracks over 100 services so far, including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS providers. While some of the initial information comprising the SMI was compiled based on research with select businesses, Abbott says an API is in the works so that the index can be integrated into products and so that services can be monitored on a real-time basis. When appropriate, the information captured will be used to populate the database with more details about cloud companies’ performance.
