With the ubiquity of cloud computing, many businesses and government agencies have contracted out critical services. Whether it’s internet access, email, collaboration or even phone services, some folks feel helpless when such a service goes down. As such, before entering into any such contract, make sure to review the service level agreement (SLA).
An SLA defines the services to be provided by the vendor, and the levels of availability, response and maintenance associated with these services. SLAs are usually associated with “business class” service. The biggest concern in an SLA is typically with availability, or the percentage of time in which a service must be accessible and usable.
Typical SLAs provide some type of monetary reimbursement if its requirements are not met. Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud-based service, for example, calls for uptime of 99.9 percent. Anything less than that and Microsoft provides credits on a graduated scale, up to 100 percent credit if downtime exceeds 5 percent in any month. To be clear, this means if the service is down for 43.2 minutes in a 30-day month, you get a 25 percent credit, and if it’s down for more than 36 hours, the month is free.
Other SLAs are more granular. It’s not unusual to see SLAs that call for one day of credit for each hour of downtime, again with a maximum of one month’s credit.
An SLA will typically define downtime in great detail. In most cases the definition is based on common sense; you don’t need to be a techie to know when the service is down. Most SLAs also have “it’s not our fault” clauses. Again, these are usually pretty fair, and if it truly is due to some other reason outside of the control of the vendor, it does not count as downtime.
Given the nature of SLAs, then, it is important for organizations to keep track of downtime. As soon as it looks like a service may be down, it is a good idea to keep a record of the events. Screen shots, even pictures, are helpful, quick and easy. The reason for this is simple. Oftentimes the information technology folks take time to troubleshoot and diagnose the problem. This easily could take a few hours depending on the complexity of the technical environment and availability of appropriate staff.
John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 25 years of information technology experience in Hawaii and around the world. He can be reached at jagsalud@live.com.
