Tuesday, 17 January 2012

EXAM - Service Level Agreement (SLA)


A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is:

A. The part of a contract that specifies responsibilities of each party
B. An agreement between the Service Provider and an internal organization
C. An agreement between a Service Provider and an external supplier
D. An agreement between the Service Provider and their customer

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Answer: D

A service-level agreement is a part of a service contract where the level of service is formally defined. In practice, the term SLA is sometimes used to refer to the contracted delivery time (of the service) or performance. As an example, internet service providers will commonly include service level agreements within the terms of their contracts with customers to define the level(s) of service being sold in plain language terms. In this case the SLA will typically have a technical definition in terms of mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair or mean time to recovery (MTTR); various data rates; throughput; jitter; or similar measurable details.

SLAs are also defined at different levels:
  • Customer-based SLA: An agreement with an individual customer group, covering all the services they use. For example, an SLA between a supplier (IT service provider) and the finance department of a large organization for the services such as finance system, payroll system, billing system, procurement/purchase system, etc.
  • Service-based SLA: An agreement for all customers using the services being delivered by the service provider. For example:
    • A car service station offers a routine service to all the customers and offers certain maintenance as a part of offer with the universal charging.
    • A mobile service provider offers a routine service to all the customers and offers certain maintenance as a part of offer with the universal charging
    • An email system for the entire organization. There are chances of difficulties arising in this type of SLA as level of the services being offered may vary for different customers (for example, head office staff may use high-speed LAN connections while local offices may have to use a lower speed leased line).
  • Multilevel SLA: The SLA is split into the different levels, each addressing different set of customers for the same services, in the same SLA.
  • Corporate-level SLA: Covering all the generic service level management (often abbreviated as SLM) issues appropriate to every customer throughout the organization. These issues are likely to be less volatile and so updates (SLA reviews) are less frequently required.
  • Customer-level SLA: covering all SLM issues relevant to the particular customer group, regardless of the services being used.
  • Service-level SLA: covering all SLM issue relevant to the specific services, in relation to this specific customer group.

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