SLA management strategy considers two well-differentiated phases: negotiating the contract and monitoring its fulfillment in real-time. Thus, SLA management encompasses the SLA contract definition: the basic schema with the QoS parameters; SLA negotiation; SLA monitoring; SLA violation detection; and SLA enforcement—according to defined policies. The main point is to build a new layer upon the grid, cloud, or SOA middleware able to create a negotiation mechanism between the providers and consumers of services. An example is the EU–funded Framework 7 research project, SLA@SOI, which is researching aspects of multi-level, multi-provider SLAs within service-oriented infrastructure and cloud computing, while another EU-funded project, VISION Cloud, has provided results concerning content-oriented SLAs. FP7 IRMOS also investigated aspects of translating application-level SLA terms to resource-based attributes to bridge the gap between client-side expectations and cloud-provider resource-management mechanisms. A summary of the results of various research projects in the area of SLAs (ranging from specifications to monitoring, management and enforcement) has been provided by the European Commission. Outsourcing Outsourcing involves the transfer of responsibility from an organization to a supplier. This new arrangement is managed through a contract that may include one or more SLAs. The contract may involve financial penalties and the right to terminate if any of the SLA metrics are consistently missed. The setting, tracking and managing SLAs is an important part of the outsourcing relationship management (ORM) discipline. Specific SLAs are typically negotiated upfront as part of the outsourcing contract and used as one of the primary tools of outsourcing governance. In software development, specific SLAs can apply to application outsourcing contracts in line with standards in software quality, as well as recommendations provided by neutral organizations like CISQ, which has published numerous papers on the topic (such as Using Software Measurement in SLAs) that are available in to the public. See also Best-effort delivery IT cost transparency Network monitoring Operational-level agreement (OLA) Service-oriented architecture (SOA) Service level Service level objective References External links Service Level Agreement (SLA) S-Cube Knowledge Model Contract law Outsourcing IT service management Terms of service Services marketing