Cultural Differences in Managing Cloud Computing Service Level Agreements

Software as a service and cloud computing are new buzzwords in the Internet-based economy. Their idea is to provide software, computing and storage capacity in large, but yet unknown numbers. The legal basis of offering such services is provided by service level agreements (SLAs). In a global economy, these SLAs are often made between companies based in different countries, thus between individuals with different cultural backgrounds. This study explains to what extent, how and why the management of SLAs may differ due to cultural differences among participants. Starting from Hofstede’s seminal work, expert interviews show that some of his findings still hold in the cloud computing world, while others have to be revised.