An Informational Model as a Guideline to Design Sustainable Green SLA (GSLA)

Recently, Service Level Agreement (SLA) and green SLA (GSLA) becomes very important for both the service providers/vendors and as well as for the users/customers. There are many ways to inform users/customers about various services with its inherent execution functionalities and even nonfunctional/Quality of Service (QoS) aspects through SLAs. However, these basic SLAs actually do not cover eco-efficient green issues or IT ethics issues for sustainable development. That is why green SLA (GSLA) already came into play for achieving sustainability in the industry. Nevertheless, the current practice of GSLA in the industry do not respect the sustainability at all. GSLA defined as a formal agreement incorporating all the traditional commitments respecting some green computing parameters such as carbon footprint, energy consumption etc. Therefore, there are still gaps for achieving sustainability through existing GSLA. To reach the goal of achieving sustainability and getting more customers, many IT (Information Technology) and ICT (Information and Communication Technology) business are looking for a real GSLA which would meet the ecological, economical and ethical aspects (3Es) of sustainability. This research discovers the missing parameters and introduce new parameters under sustainability hoods. In addition, it defines GSLA of sustainability with new green performance indicators and their measurable units. It also discovers the management complexity of proposed new GSLA through designing a general informational model and identifies various new entities and their effects with other entities under three pillars of sustainability. The ICT engineer could use the informational model as a guideline to design a sustainable GSLA for the industry. Therefore, the proposed model could help different service providers/vendors to define their future business strategies for the upcoming sustainable society. Keywords—SLA; GSLA; Green Computing; Sustainability; IT ethics; Informational model