To successfully compete in today’s marketplace, every company needs to have effective 24/7 business availability. Increasingly, service-level agreements (SLA) help to ensure that companies meet and respond to employee and customer needs, regardless of the obstacle. A fine-tuned, well-negotiated SLA can make the difference between your firm successfully weathering different types of disasters, or succumbing to them.

In broad terms, the SLA is an internal or external contract for the delivery of services. Externally, the SLA functions as a legal agreement between your business and a provider that covers, for example, data protection and restoration. As a binding agreement between management and the IT department, an internal SLA generally covers data protection services. It specifies the time required for total data restoration (RTO) to get your company back up and running. Finally, a good SLA is about meeting the needs of your business, not the IT department, for uptime and availability.

SLA: Five Essentials You Should Know

Most businesses don’t necessarily succeed by having better technology; they succeed by using technology better. This includes employing SLAs to help optimize in-house operations. For example, if your data center is the victim of a virus attack or server outage, a good SLA dictates how quickly you can be back up and running. And it can make the difference between your company successfully competing or losing out to the competition.

By creating an official agreement with an IT department or a vendor to handle outsourcing network design, support, and implementation your firm can conserve resources for the internal tasks it does best. Here are five essential points to keep in mind when creating optimal service-level agreements:

1. Don’t be scared of SLAs.

Don’t make your SLA harder than necessary to implement.

-          set clear and reasonable expectations regarding terms of service.

-          reach a mutual understanding and agreement on benchmarks to be met by IT as well as deliverables.

 2. Recognize that the SLA is an agreement with standard contents.

While every SLA is unique to each partnership, it should be used as a minimum deliverables guide with expected goals and benchmarks for both parties to meet.

- the SLA should be a partnership in which the agreement is mutually supportive, not adversarial.

3. Classify applications based on relevance.

- identify mission-critical applications accordingly when it comes to data recovery.

- allow for increasing IT complexity by including infrastructure and network appliances, such as packet shapers and management devices.

4. Know the tools/metrics available.

      An SLA provides, in measurable terms, the internal services guaranteed to you by your IT department or by a vendor.

      - network monitoring and management tools can track service levels and document a vendor’s performance.

- measure and compare your SLA with other agreements to find one that serves you the best.

5. Understand impact on your business.  

A good SLA can make the difference between your firm doing well after a major data loss incident, or adversely suffering because of it.

The Benefits of an Effective SLA

The critical question for you to consider is this: How much downtime can your company afford to get back on its feet? Once a disaster does occur, the time it takes for your firm to recover (RTO) has the potential to adversely impact your profits, productivity, reputation, and customer satisfaction.

In defining an optimal service-level agreement, the value is best measured in minutes of downtime, not hours or days. And an SLA can be essential for protecting you against critical data loss and excessive server downtime at a time when you could be most vulnerable.

Taking advantage of the expertise and specialization of a quality IT team or experienced vendor can give you improved efficiency, workflow, and quality of service (QoS). However, an IT team “fights fires” all the time and unless there is a formal agreement set up such as an SLA, key fixes, backups, and protection may be pushed to the bottom of the task queue.

A recent Ziff-Davis sponsored Baseline IT Management and Solutions survey of IT executives indicates that 85 percent of organizations will boost their investment in SLA-related governance processes and applications in 2010. Effectively managing SLAs between a company and its IT department or with outside vendors has become critical to running a robust data center.

However, passing the risk and responsibility for troubleshooting and solving problems to a second party requires a certain level of trust and confidence in your IT department or in the provider. To reinforce that trust, an detailed SLA is critical for setting up suitable expectations between both parties. Most SLAs stipulate expected levels of e-business functioning to guarantee that your company will receive both performance reliability as well as adequate, time-sensitive data recovery (DR) results. You should also insist on adequate measurement tools to ensure that performance levels are being met or exceeded.

It’s also safe to assume that for many companies the benefits of immediate recovery based on a successful SLA extend across a range of technology and service areas. Most importantly, the benefits of near-instantaneous data restoration guarantee that you can provide a high level of service to your customers and remain confident in your e-business and network-related processes, even after a disaster.

Essentially, the key to a successful SLA agreement is based on your being clear about your data-related needs and goals. Determine for yourself how long your company can suffer through crippling data losses, server downtime, or inefficient back-up processes. Then, be willing to treat the IT team or outsourcing vendor as an equal partner who’s committed to achieving effective HA and data recovery so that your company can thrive.