SLA – Service Level Agreement

Importance of SLAs in IT

SLA stands for Service Level Agreement within the scope of an IT service. It serves to contractually agree the quality or scope of a service. In this way, a commercial enterprise receives a reliable basis for its activity. The contract should precisely define the requirements – for example, that a server must be available seven days a week, 24 hours a day with a maximum failure rate of 0.1 per cent. Furthermore, it is necessary to specify the response times. It is possible to differentiate these further – for example, specifying a response time of 30 minutes on weekdays and one hour at weekends. Further contractual content include the obligations of the client in the event of damage as well as the possible communication channels. For example, many SLAs state that the customer must report a fault immediately by phone, email or ticket service. This is important to ensure rapid remediation. In addition, it is sensible to also specify the sanctions for non-compliance with the contract.

When should a Proof of Concept be carried out?

SLAs primarily serve to safeguard business-critical applications. Which functions these are varies from business to business. Companies frequently enter into corresponding agreements for the maintenance of their servers. However, it is also possible to apply them to the provision of databases, printers, files or emails.

100% SLA? Almost impossible:

Most SLAs guarantee an availability of around 99 per cent. Some customers wonder whether it would make sense to set 100 per cent right away. However, that is technically almost impossible. Even an outage of just one second would mean that the figure drops below 100 per cent. In such a short time, no technician could repair the damage. Furthermore, the effort involved would be extremely high, as they would have to be on site around the clock to monitor the system. This would incur immense costs that would be completely out of proportion to the benefit. Therefore, all realistic SLAs provide for an availability of just under 100 per cent.

SLA calculation example

One of the crucial components of an SLA is defining the availability of a specific system. To do this, it is first necessary to precisely define the desired operating hours. For example, a web server is normally in operation 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. For a company server, on the other hand, it may only be required during business hours – for instance, 250 days per year for eight hours each day. This results in very different requirements. Finally, it is necessary to record a precise availability figure. How high this value should be depends primarily on how high the financial loss would be in the event of an outage.

If an availability of 99 per cent is set for the web server mentioned above, the following values result, for example:

Operating time: 365 days x 24 hours

Service level for availability: 99%

Maximum downtime per year: 3 days, 15 hours, 36 minutes

New Media Service GmbH offers these services in the field of SLAs

At New Media Service GmbH, it is possible to conclude SLAs for many different business applications. This ranges from internet and email availability for banks to printer availability in companies that produce delivery notes or shipping labels. In each individual case, the specific requirements are defined together with the customer. Even for scheduled maintenance work, it is possible to precisely define downtimes and subsequently agree a suitable SLA.

If you would like to find out more, you can simply request a free, non-binding consultation by contacting us. We will be happy to inform you about this topic and, if required, handle the implementation and execution for you.