DR Planning to meet Service Level Agreements

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a written agreement made between a service provider and the service recipient. It features most commonly in the IT industry where levels of service are critical as downtime can be costly, but where the complex technology can be at odds with reliability. The SLA underpins the standards for delivery of the service itself and can be included in the formal contract.

Clauses in the Service Level Agreement can define levels of service, incentives for additional performance, penalties for failing to meet the agreed levels of service, plus support options and standards. An SLA is a method for a service provider to guarantee a quality of service to the customer.

Telecoms service levels may define percentages of calls abandoned while waiting to be answered, percentage of calls answered within a set time such as 90% in 30 seconds, percentage of enquiries handled within one incoming call, average time for a call to be answered, plus service uptime.

Effective Recovery for SLA Compliance

The penalties imposed by the SLA in the event of any business or communications downtime would only compound the costs incurred through lost business and reputation, and as such an effective recovery plan becomes an essential aspect of compliance.

Integral to discussions between service provider and customer when negotiating a contract will be provision for disaster recovery. A customer will seek assurances that the provider is able to meet the terms of the SLA and may insist upon details of the provider's capacity and resilience. Demonstrable redundancy, coupled with resilience via comprehensive backup systems, will assure customers that the levels of service agreed upon in the Service Level Agreement can be realistically promised and will likely be met.

Service Uptime Guarantees Whereas varying levels of support dependant on severity of the reported fault are usually acceptable, high levels of uptime are commonly required such that many SLA promise 99.9% uptime. This is a hefty demand on technologies such as servers and the applications that run on them, with human error a common factor as well. The only realistic option is building effective resilience into business structures with disaster recovery being integral. Having the capacity to handle periods of high demand on business services is one area of importance, but when disaster strikes and in-house systems have failed, a recovery plan needs to be implemented to maintain business continuity and to meet the terms of existing SLA. Outsourcing this requirement can prove the most cost effective solution plus be the assurance a prospective customer needs as the perception will be of spreading the load.

Telecom Service Level Agreements

Given the well understood reliability issues inherent in high tech equipment and systems, particularly phone and communications systems, service providers need to issue strong reassurances by use of a comprehensive SLA.

As well as the expectations with call handling and response, there are also planned outages for maintenance that need to be covered. A hosted telecoms DR solution such as that provided by PhonePresence will not only cover the unforeseen emergencies and downtime, but can also be used during scheduled maintenance and be used to handle overflow during periods of high demand on business communications.