Service Level Agreement (SLA) - What Does It Mean For Your Business?

What level of assurance do you have from your cloud or internet provider that services will be there when you need them most? The term SLA or Service Level Agreement is a technology industry term that governs the availability of your services, often in terms of a percentage.

One of the biggest concerns I often hear from companies moving their technology to the cloud is "what is the reliability like? Will my data and services always be there and accessible?" SLAs are a critical piece to the equation as businesses move more and more of their technology to the cloud.

There are two important SLAs to consider with cloud services:

1. The SLA on your internet connection.
2. The SLA your cloud provider offers. 

Both are equally important as even if the cloud services remain up, if your internet access goes down, often times your access to the cloud is impacted. 

While SLAs are important, as a business you need to understand what they really mean. 

What they are:

• A promise that if there is a service interruption exceeding a certain threshold you will be entitled to financial compensation. This motivates the service provider to address issues as quickly as possible. 

What they are not:

• A guarantee that your services will never be uninterrupted

For instance if a service provider promises a 99.9% up time what they are really promising is less than 32 minutes of service interruption per month and if they fall below that metric you'll be eligible for a credit.

Despite the fact that an SLA does to guarantee that you as a business will never experience downtime, it's important for a few reasons.

The first is that it motivates the service provider is put redundant systems in place to prevent outages and issues such as redundant servers, power, backup, and geographically diverse data centers.

Second is that it motivates the service provider to fix issues as fast and be sure their people are on call 24x7 to make sure issues are resolved quickly.

It's important when choosing both a cloud and internet provider that you consider their Service Level Agreements as if you don't have both providers covered, and issue with one often creates an issue with both.