Juan Carlos Perez has an interesting piece about service level agreements with web apps. A lot of people tend not to think of this aspect until after the fact. I’ve seen cases where a company purchased the “shiny machine that goes ping” only to find out that it would be down 28% of the time. Not a good number to run on when your business is web facing.
From Infoworld:
As SaaS (software as a service) adoption rises in the workplace, business managers mustn’t overlook a key issue when selecting a Web-hosted applications suite: a service-level agreement.
Such contractual agreements, known as SLAs, bind the SaaS provider to meet specified levels of service. An SLA can address various aspects of the service, such as application uptime and performance, as well as data security, backup, recovery, and integrity. The SLA outlines penalties — often in the form of credits — if certain standards aren’t met.
An SLA is of particular importance for a hosted application, since in that case, the customer is giving up control over the software and, thus, has little or no power to fix problems that arise on the SaaS vendor’s end.
In other words, a business manager must make sure that a selected SaaS vendor can provide the level of reliable service the company needs. “IT [and business] managers need to understand the consequences for their operations if there’s a problem. [They should] determine what downtime they can tolerate and compare that with what the vendor is offering,” says Eric Maiwald, a Burton Group analyst.
Once a contract is signed and the hosted applications are implemented and woven into a company’s workflow, migrating away to another provider will be costly and time-consuming.
I’ve been fortunate to have not encountered this particular problem first hand. However, I have seen it in other companies. The SaaS web app with the pretty graphics could be a dud. Get your SLA squared away before your sign on the dotted line.
[tags]SLA, Web App Uptime, SAAS, Service Level Agreement[/tags]
