Intellyx BrainBlog for Nobl9 by Jason Bloomberg
Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) have been an important IT consideration for decades, reaching the pinnacle of their importance in the late 1990s as enterprises built out their first-generation Internet presences.
Today, however, the venerable SLA is largely obsolete – even though many organizations still consider them essential. Understanding their limitations, and in particular, what we should replace them with, is now an essential part of modern computing.
Setting SLOs isn’t solely an engineering decision. It’s a business decision that requires input from multiple stakeholders.
What’s Wrong with SLAs?
“A service-level agreement (SLA) is a commitment between a service provider and a client,” according to Wikipedia. “Particular aspects of the service – quality, availability, responsibilities – are agreed between the service provider and the service user.”
SLAs are thus contracts between third parties – contracts that can drive the wrong business outcomes.
SLAs require the service provider to do the bare minimum to comply with the contract. Anything more and they’d simply be spending money they don’t have to. This focus on providing the minimum required level of service forces IT organizations to become a commodity purveyor and not a strategic, value-added partner to the business.
At best, SLAs are marginally useful when there’s a contractual relationship between service provider and customer. However, when the service provider is internal to the organization – a common pattern among large enterprises – SLAs make even less sense. We need a better approach.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
