Despite these obstacles, customers can get a fair shake. With a little care, persistence, and planning, it's possible to negotiate reasonable SLAs that promote solid performance and provide useful remedies when service flags.
THE BATTLE OF THE FORMS
The threshold issue in every negotiation is whether to start with the carrier's form SLAs. These are replete with loopholes, traps, gotchas, and excuses. Nevertheless, the pragmatic choice is to start with the form. Unless a large volume of business is at stake ($10 million or more in annual purchases), starting from a customer's draft SLA creates conflict and delay without yielding substantial benefits. In general, SLA negotiations proceed more smoothly when the carrier's form is used, and customers focus on revising the substance.
This isn't always easy, however. Appearance and reality often diverge in form SLAs. A favorite tactic of carriers is to offer a tough-looking "target," such as 99.95 percent end-to-end availability, with remedies that start only when uptime slips below 99.8 percent. Another tactic is to exclude from SLA measures access or tail circuits leased from local exchange carriers. Still another is to count outage time for a particular service interruption only after the outage continues for some minimum period, such as 15 minutes or even an hour. As with any statistics, SLA metrics are only as useful as the fine print defining them.
Negotiating a good SLA means understanding the carrier's form, identifying the gotchas and exceptions, then neutralizing as many of them as possible. A good first step is to identify when and how the carrier's commitments apply, and when remedies start. How are outages defined and tracked? Does the customer have to report SLA violations to get credits? When do credits start accruing? When do escalation commitments start? The only way to know the value of an SLA is to determine what real guarantees it offers.
Discover the benefits of scalable backbone and network services for application and cloud providers.
Network automation is gaining momentum. Here's how you can drive this powerful technology to its full potential.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
