An alternate and more acceptable approach is to have objective definitions for the severity categories – for example: severity 1 could be defined as a complete outage of the system, while a severity 3 could be emails not being sent out through the system. Since response times are based on the severity of the issue, ideally you should have sole discretion in categorizing the severity level of the issue. Therefore, avoid providing resolution times or provide them only for the most predictable issues. Since a SaaS product has many dependencies, debugging an issue may be tricky, and it can be hard to predict how long it will take to resolve. Resolution time is the time it will take you to resolve the issue and restore the service back to normal. Sometimes the customer may require the SLA to specify “resolution times”’ in addition to response times. Within one business day of receiving the report. Within four hours of receiving the report Response times are typically provided in the form of a matrix. Issues dealing with partial to complete outages will typically have very short response times, while support personnel may take a few hours to respond to less urgent requests such as minor functionality not working. Response times may vary depending on the severity of the issue. The response time is the time it takes your support team to respond to your customer’s problem report and to start investigating the issue. Response Time and Resolution Time for Support These constraints should be considered when describing the performance service level.Ī typical SLA for availability would exclude from its calculation any downtime beyond your control such as due to general network slow-down or client server problems and would typically be no better than the service level provided by the third-party hosting provider. Additionally, you will likely not have control over the client side of the communication or the performance of the network (usually the internet). When setting your availability service level you should factor in the availability guarantee your hosting provider has with you. For example, if the hosting piece of the service is provided by a third party, such as Amazon Web Services.
When setting out the performance level of the service, consider any dependencies it may have. Hosting: “ The service will be available 99.5% of the time in any given calendar month.” Support: “ Telephone support is available between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm on weekdays, except statutory holidays.” Specifically, the SLA will describe when the service is available and how reliable the service is. The SLA will define what level of performance the customer can expect. Expected Performance Level of the Service For example, a SaaS product that deals with providing reports may have SLAs around frequency of reporting and the accuracy of the reports. You may provide additional service levels related to the specific functionality of your SaaS. Hosting service levels relate to hosting aspects of your SaaS – how long the system will remain available during a given period, frequency of backups, levels of data security that may be implemented. While SLAs may be stand-alone agreements, they are usually included as part of the master SaaS contract in line with the main body or as a schedule to the agreement.Īs a SaaS supplier, your support service levels will typically address what kind of support you will provide the user (error fixes, regular updates etc.), hours of support, how quickly you will respond to an issue, and how frequently updates are made to the system. Your SaaS SLA will likely service levels around support and hosting.
#Software categories saas client server software#
Typically, as a Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) supplier, you provide a software application service through a hosted environment that is accessible to end users through the internet. SLAs can be provided for any industry and the categories of services and the levels of the service will vary with the industry.
The SLA’s primary purpose is to define the level of service the user will receive, not the specific mechanics of service delivery. The service provider can be internal (such as the legal department or IT Helpdesk) or external (such as a hosting provider, a SaaS supplier or a backup service provider). A service level agreement (“SLA”) is an agreement between a service provider and its client, the user of its services.
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