Wednesday, 19 March 2014 Blog ehdf

Servicing your needs with smart SLAs

With increased reliance on information technology, customers’ expectations from IT systems have increased significantly. Based on whether these systems are meant to serve the needs of enterprises or personal needs, individuals and businesses must know what type of SLA will work for them. Hosting services, like every other business, use financial contracts known as SLAs or Service Level Agreements, to establish terms and conditions between the buyer and the seller. These will protect the datacenter provider and outline basic customer rights.

A good SLA must define and factor in all aspects of hosted service management, such as security management, system failure management and compensation expected for network downtime. This requires communication and interaction between the parties.

SLAs need to include: what you can expect from the local or international provider, the duration of service, associated expenses, recovery and maintenance charges and other finer details. Privacy, security and application features also form an important part of such contracts.

Customized SLAs are designed as per customer requirements, and are highly service based. The eHDF service, for instance, includes service desk targets that ensure transparency, high quality of incident handling and resolution.

It is vital that users understand some of the related technicalities in order to make an informed choice. Reading up on SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and types of cloud will be beneficial when communicating your data needs to your provider. You should further ensure that you are compensated for service downtime. More importantly, outline favorable exit clauses in the agreement, and manage your data storage or backup accordingly. SLAs are thus important to establish volume, quality and specifics of services – they are also vital in establishing the company’s ownership of data or intelligence.

eHosting Data Fort offers both standard and customized SLAs as per client and contract requirements. The standard SLAs are provided on all eHDF infrastructures such as datacenter facilities and server hardware, as well as network infrastructure and internet connectivity.

eHDF’s SLAs are all credit-based, and provide monthly service reports and a dedicated service account manager for every customer. The service account manager organizes periodic service review meetings to tackle service performance and focus on improvements and upgrades as they become available. eHosting Data Fort offers customer-focused solutions with an emphasis on delivering a high quality service experience and operationally supported Service Level Agreements.