HySOR: A Simulation Model for the Sharing of Risk in a Service Level Agreement-Aware Hybrid Cloud

More and more organizations are considering public cloud services for their business. Functional improvements, innovative features, and strategic factors are further driving demand. The adoption of public cloud services typically involves the integration into existing IT architectures and an established service structure that is ideally aligned with the non-functional requirements of the business processes to be supported. Hybrid cloud providers must be able to accommodate a variety of different public cloud providers while ensuring continuity of service or appropriate compensation prior to implementation. Existing literature focuses on the calculation and simulation of service availability, but less on service credit or business process outage costs of service compositions. In consequence, this paper presents a calculation and simulation model for the concept of "sharing of risk" in Service Level Agreement (SLA)-aware hybrid clouds (HySOR), focusing on the risk-sensitive simulation of the financial impact on hybrid cloud providers and customers. The model was implemented as an R-based application and evaluated with 12 leading experts in the field, yielding interesting implications for theory and practice.