Know Your Service-Level Agreement (SLA)

When you contract with a cloud-solution provider, part of your contract will contain the service-level agreement (SLA) that defines the levels of service the provider must meet, costs, performance metrics, as well as remedies and penalties for the vendor railing to meet objectives. SLAs include several common components:

• Agreement goals and objectives

• Services provided and services not provided

• System uptime, normally expressed as a percentage, such as 99.9 percent

• The provider’s run-time monitoring capabilities and event notification

• Pricing, to include the provider’s billing policy for various types of resource use (such as CPUs, disk space, and databases)

• The provider’s technical-support operations, such as time-of-day availability, call-time delay, and event response time and escalation policies

• The availability of application and system logs as well as the customer’s ability to inspect them within a timely fashion

• The providers data center locations, colocation, and restrictions (such as based only in the United States)

• The provider’s data-privacy policy

• The provider’s security policies, procedures, and certifications

• Whether the solution will use multitenant-based systems and applications

• Customer and provider roles and responsibilities as well as shared responsibilities

• The provider’s backup policies and procedures for company-based data stored in the cloud

• Data ownership and exporting capabilities

• System and service provisioning to onboard the customer

• Cloud provider insurance and limitations of liabilities

• The provider’s reporting capabilities, format, and frequency

• Resolution steps the customer should take in the event the solution provider fails to meet the service levels