 Chapter 5: Improving Security, Governance, and Cloud Reliability 51 A standardized and automated system needs to be in place to  track, trace, and audit all aspects of performance. For example,  bandwidth, connectivity, and scalability are all performance  characteristics that should be monitored. In addition, automated  systems should be designed to quickly identify the root cause  of the hardware or software failures so performance can be  restored. These systems should answer questions such as Monitoring must include the ability to quickly respond to dramatic or unexpected performance fluctuations, especially  as a result of malicious activities. Authorized users need visibility into your public, private, and/or hybrid cloud environments. A  service level agreement  (SLA)  is a document that captures the  understanding between a service  user and service provider that defines uptime, availability, and  performance. The SLA is also a  contractual agreement between  the participants in a service delivery  contract. In the world of computing,  an SLA is typically written based  on the expectation that a system  could be operational 99.99 percent  of the month. It may also specify  that the service provider’s help desk  will respond to an outage in a set  amount of time. Also, the service  provider is expected not to share a  company’s information with anyone  and that data will be preserved for  a set period of time and backed up  regularly. In a complex hybrid cloud  environment, managing SLAs of all  the relationships of all cloud services  a company may be dependent on  can get complicated. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any  dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Defining SLAs ✓ Is the cloud infrastructure performing as expected? ✓ Are identified performance problems occurring randomly  at regular intervals? ✓ Which performance problems are most severe and need  to be given top priority to find the root cause and resolve  the issue? ✓ How can performance be improved?