Service Level Agreement - SLA

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contract between your organisation and the vendor of your system(s) to provide a range of support services, up to an agreed minimum standard. SLAs will usually specific precisely what the support procedures are to be and the way in which a support call will be escalated through the vendor's support organisation to achieve resolution.

SLAs should always have a maximum response time. In other words, from the moment the call is logged with the vendor, the SLA should specify the response time until either, an engineer arrives on site or perhaps a member of technical support calls back.

It is very important to discuss the details of the SLA with the vendor because, often, the only time when you will use it, is when you have suffered a breakdown or problem with your systems and it is then that you will need to depend upon the 'fine print' of the SLA.