What are SLAs?
A service level agreement (SLA) is a contract made between a service provider and a customer to ensure a minimum level of service is maintained.
SLAs in the cloud computing industry cover response times and service availability. They are vital in providing the benchmark that hosting providers must meet to deliver a reliable service for their customers.
SLAs are usually part of a hosting services agreement (HSA) between the hosting provider and customer, which outlines the responsibilities of both parties during the contract agreement. They set out the service level the hosting provider agrees to meet in terms of response times, availability and cover any exclusions to the agreement (such as scheduled maintenance).
How important are SLAs?
SLAs can be compared to a warranty for a service provided. For customers, they are a vital consideration when choosing a hosting provider.
Downtime is a key concern for all businesses, having the potential to affect your reputation and your bottom line. To avoid downtime, hosting providers need to guarantee connectivity and business continuity, and this is demonstrated through the provider’s SLAs.
SLAs have become increasingly important as companies move their critical systems, data and applications to the cloud. The responsibility of running these systems is no longer in the hands of the customer and is now managed by a third party.
Cloud providers need to meet industry-level SLAs in order to offer a competitive service. Almost all enterprise level hosts offer a 99.999% uptime guarantee, whereas low budget providers do not offer this same level of service.
Cloud SLAs
Cloud SLAs are used as a guide for dealing with any potential problems with the platform or service, such as the stability of the service and security of company data. They set expectations and instil customer confidence in the service, aiming to prevent any future issues.
SLAs are living documents that should adapt with any new cloud services that a company adopts. An SLA assessment process should also be carried out to ensure that the additional services have the appropriate service level agreements in place.
The most comprehensive cloud SLAs include:
- Cloud server uptime
- Network availability
- Power
- Hardware replacement
- Performance (max response times)
- Security of data (data encryption etc)
- Location of data
- Accessibility and portability of data
- Disaster Recovery
- Change management processes (changes or updates to services)
- Incident response times
- Customer support response times
Service interruptions
What happens if an SLA isn’t met? If there were any interruptions in service and SLAs were not met, customers would be able to refer to their contract and request the appropriate course of action, whether it be a refund or service credits.
Learn about our industry-leading cloud SLAs
Our cloud SLAs go above and beyond industry standards, giving you the peace of mind that any issues will be resolved swiftly and allowing you to focus on what you do best – running your business. Our SLAs cover all elements of our hosting, with key points to note being our guarantee for rapid hardware replacement within 20 minutes for customers on our blade server technology, and guaranteed response time of under 20 minutes for urgent priority issues.
Our Technical Support Engineer Leo explained in our insight on Minimising downtime through fast and effective support, ‘For hardware replacement, our guaranteed time of under 20 minutes is significantly quicker than other providers, who offer between 1-4 hour hardware replacement SLAs as standard.’
If you’re interested in the benefits of our cloud solutions, including our industry-leading SLAs, we can arrange an initial consultation to discuss your needs. Fill out our contact form and one of our cloud experts will be in touch.
