Service-level agreements

In modern day enterprises, most business services are accompanied by an assurance from the provider, as well as an expectation of the consumer, albeit internal or external. The consumers of the enterprise business services expect not only high availability and high performance, but also an assurance on reliability and predictability. These assurances and expectations are defined on different attributes of a business service such as availability, performance, usage levels, support, and so on. These expectations are spread over a specific time horizon such as a day, week, month, quarter, or a year. This mutual consonance on the quality of service between the provider and the consumer over a period of time is known as a service-level agreement (SLA).

SLAs are common in most of the enterprise service offerings today. In many cases, SLAs are legally binding between a service provider and a customer. They usually contain a service description, definition of terms like...