D.-S. Huang et al. (Eds.): ICIC 2014, LNAI 8589, pp. 434–443, 2014. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 Dynamically Changing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) Management in Cloud Computing Waleed Halboob 1 , Haider Abbas 1,2 , Kamel Haouam 3 , and Asif Yaseen 4 1 Center of Excellence in Information Assurance, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia {wmohammed.c,hsiddiqui}@ksu.edu.sa 2 National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan haiderabbas-mcs@nust.edu.pk 3 Department of Computer Science, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia haouam@ksu.edu.sa 4 School of Integrative Systems, University of Queensland, Australia Uqayasee@uq.edu.au Abstract. Managing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in cloud computing in a dynamic manner becomes a critical issue for cloud service providers. This is due to the emerging technology and the frequent and continuous change in cloud service requirements and techniques over the time. Current cloud SLAs management methods are rigorous in terms of SLA updation to incorporate new changes. Since updating any SLA, to meet any required change in cloud requirements and techniques, requires reformulation and remapping to all available SLAs (called public SLAs). This paper proposed a mechanism to dynamically manage cloud computing SLAs based on Real Options Analysis (ROA) concept. The proposed model maps the required changes to all public SLAs and sorts out the most related or suitable SLAs (solutions) based on options theory while recording the other solutions for any future change according to emerging circumstances. The technique incorporates any new change dynamically; by mapping it to a limited number of SLAs (recorded solutions) based on various options presented by ROA. The framework presented in this paper would provide a flexible solution in managing cloud SLAs in both cloud provider and the user’s perspectives. Keywords: Cloud computing, Service level agreement (SLA), Real options analysis, User requirements. 1 Introduction Cloud computing is a modern computation technique in which the data is stored on interconnected servers permanently and cached temporarily through handheld devices, laptops , computer terminals , tablets etc. [1]. Cloud computing differs from grid computing in that the shared pool of virtualized accessible computing resources can be rented by consumers with minimum management and interaction efforts [2][22].