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By Bozidar Spirovski

Communication links provided by telco providers are critical to most businesses. And as any network admin will tell you, these links tend to have outages, ranging from small interruptions to massive breakdowns that can last for days.

When such interruptions occur, businesses suffer, but unless the provider has serious contractual obligations, there is little effort on their side to improve service or correct issues. That is why businesses need a good service level agreement (SLA).

Usually, the preparation of the SLA is dreaded by most, since it is full of numbers and parameters on which the client must decide what is acceptable and whose values may be difficult to measure.

SLA Parameters

A good SLA is not necessarily loaded with a lot of numbers. You need to work with two to three parameters that are important to you.

Here are the most common SLA parameters, with their acceptable values:

• Availability -- more than 99 percent for Internet, more than 99.5 percent for corporate data links
• Packet loss -- less than 0.4 percent for Internet, less than 0.2 percent for corporate data links
• Jitter -- less then 15ms for Internet, less then 5ms for corporate data links

SLA Penalties

And you need penalties that will hurt the provider. Penalties are the big stick in the SLA.

Here are the penalties that you want:

• Small breach of SLA -- 25 percent to 33 percent of monthly fee
• Large breach of SLA -- 50 percent to 100 percent of monthly fee

Be aware that no provider will create an SLA that will eat much of its profits. The committed provider can be identified by the type of SLA that it's prepared to sign without special negotiations.

Here are three different levels of SLAs -- not so much by the metrics and parameters, but quite different in terms of penalties

• Verizon is offering a very basic SLA, with compensation of the daily charge for each day of SLA breach: http://www.verizonbusiness.com/terms/latam/co/sla/
• BT is accepting a more serious approach -- a penalty of a daily charge for each hour of SLA breach, but with a maximum 10 days of charge in penalty: http://business.bt.com/assets/pdf/BTnet%20Service%20Level%20Agreement.pdf
• Sprint is including some really hard penalties in their SLA, including a 100 percent of monthly charge in penalties for some parameters: http://www.sprint.com/business/resources/mpls_vpn.pdf

Copyright © 2009 - 2010 WireHead Security, LLC

Bozidar Spirovski is an information security expert with Information Security Short Takes.

Comments (2)

	1. 06-25-2010 16:55
	While these are definitely important things to have established, without the leverage of a large number of links many companies lack negotiating power. Without the true incentive of losing the provider money, feet will drag in troubleshooting these problems. The key point is to find a good provider who is willing to stand behind their network with a good SLA and a good service department without having to twist their arm.    -sean Registered

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	2. 06-26-2010 10:03
	Very practical advice regarding SLAs; the degree to which more stringent terms can be negotiated is often dependent on the size of the customer. It's also important to remember that a good SLA is no substitute for an effective BCP plan when trouble arises. Registered

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