An SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a guaranteed service level agreement. We mainly deal with it in the IT industry, for hosting or cloud services, but also for the provision of dedicated, in other words, tailor-made software. While with the latter it is usually possible to negotiate its terms, with large suppliers they are often not very negotiable.
What to begin with when creating or negotiating an SLA?
🔴 A fundamental issue is the definition of service-level objectives (SLO). The entire process of determining SLOs should involve not only such people as lawyers but also people with business knowledge (which allows, in particular, to determine the value of relevant software for a given company) and technical expertise.
🔴 Each time, it is necessary to determine how relevant the software and its operation are to the client organisation. However, one should bear in mind that agreeing on indicators at a very high level involves higher costs, so it is important to determine how they actually correspond to the client’s requirements.
🔴In an SLA we usually define service availability levels, response times, repairs, error reporting procedures, error categories, reporting, and sanctioning. In the following posts, we will briefly discuss individual elements of such an agreement.
