Service level agreements for hybrid cloud deployments require diligence. Steve Groom, CEO of Vissensa, a managed service provider, discusses what he's found to be important when creating SLAs for customer hybrid cloud deployments.

1. The
New MSP
Service Level
Agreement
SLA Playbook

2. How MSPs are
customizing SLAs.
Prefabricated SLA
templates can no longer be
plucked from a hard drive
and e-mailed to clients.
MSPs must collaborate
with customers to create an
SLA that balances business
Hybrid cloud
deployments
and the era
of always-on.demands with the cost
expectations of the service.
Steve Groom, CEO of MSP
Vissensa, offers insights on
what MSPs should consider
in creating custom SLAs.

3. Be specific
about uptime.
“When it comes to the rate
disinfectants kill bacteria,
99.9% might be sufficient—
but that doesn’t work
with promised uptime.
99.999% is 5.26 minutes
per year, but go to 99.95%,
and it’s 4.3 hours a year,”
Groom says. “That’s a
huge difference, especially
when there’s mandatory
downtime for patching.”
The
inthe details.
devil’s

4. Set client
expectations.
Groom: “The education
process is closer to
collaboration than
explanation. Customers
need to understand
exactly what they should
Collaborate
and
educate.be expecting from an
SLA, and MSPs need to
know what the objective
of the SLA is in a business
context.Identifying the
critical services, such as
data recovery or network
connectivity is key, so
we can consider how to
include these in an SLA.”

5. Cut the service
credits.
“As we get more and more
into the expectation of
always-on, there’s no point
in offering a service credit if
you fail to match the SLA,”
Groom says. “The damage
to a business of not
being on, even for a brief
moment, is exponential to
what a service credit can
make up for.”
Making
is
hard
to do.
up

6. SLAs need to
work together.
“If a disk fails, we’ll
respond and inform the
customer, who might have
a standing instruction
implied in a service SLA,”
Groom says. “But that
has to be intertwined with
Keep your
eye on
the
big picture.the hardware SLA, which
considers the infrastructure.
We have to be diligent in
keeping them informed
of our actions within the
parameters of all
our agreements.”

7. You might underdeliver.
“The most important
thing is not to overextend
your SLAs beyond the
SLAs that your upstream
providers are able to
commit to,” Groom says.
Don’t
overpromise.“That’s really key. If you
skimp on a data center
resource, overpromising
on uptime is a guarantee
you might not be able
to match.”

8. Learn more.
Read more about
customized SLAs and
the hybrid cloud from
Pivot Point.