Managed IT services SLA: the clauses that decide the service you will receive

• Response ≠ resolution Many contracts only guarantee the first, and it is the second that matters to the business.
• Severity The most important clause and the least read, because it decides which deadline applies.
• Consequence An SLA without one is an intention, not a commitment.
• The cost of an hour of downtime Without this number, you are negotiating blind.

Almost every IT contract has an SLA, and almost nobody reads it carefully before signing. It is usually only read after an outage, looking for what could have been demanded.

It is what separates “we provide support” from a verifiable commitment. Without it, service quality is a matter of opinion: the client thinks it took too long, the provider thinks it was reasonable, and there is no criterion to settle it.

Response time measures how long it takes someone to acknowledge the request and start working on it. Resolution time measures how long it takes for the problem to be solved.

A contract that only guarantees “response within 1 hour” technically allows a server to be down for three days without breaching the SLA, as long as someone responded in the first hour. It is the distinction most contracts use in the provider's favour.

Serious providers guarantee resolution times for critical incidents and work to targets for the rest. That is reasonable. What is not reasonable is a contract that does not distinguish between the two concepts.

Question to ask: “Besides response, what resolution time is contractually guaranteed, and for which incidents?” If the answer is vague, so is the commitment.

SLAs organise incidents into levels, with different deadlines. The usual structure:

• Critical Company at a standstill or an essential service unavailable to everyone.
• High Significant impact, many users affected or no workaround.
• Medium Localised impact, with a workaround.
• Low Routine requests, questions and minor changes.

The list matters less than the question: who classifies? If the provider decides alone, any tight deadline becomes theoretical; it is enough to call “medium” what the client considers critical. A balanced contract defines objective criteria and an escalation mechanism for when the parties disagree.

Between 99% and 99.9% there is a factor of ten in accepted downtime, and a large difference in cost: each additional nine requires redundancy that someone pays for.

Also read how it is measured: over what period, whether scheduled maintenance counts and who does the measuring. A 99.9% measured annually allows eight consecutive hours of downtime without a formal breach.

The usual consequences are credits on the following month's fee, scaled by severity, and the right to terminate without penalty in the event of repeated failures. Neither compensates for the real damage of an outage, but both put the incentive on the right side.

Exclusions state what does not count as a provider failure: telecoms operator failures, faults in hardware not covered by maintenance, changes made by the client without notice, force majeure. Specific exclusions are normal; exclusions so broad that they empty the agreement are not.

Start with the maths, not the deadlines: what does an hour of downtime cost? Add up unproductive salaries, lost revenue and the cost of catching up. With that figure, the conversation becomes economic: if an hour of downtime costs X, it makes sense to pay Y a month to reduce expected downtime.

1. Which resolution times are guaranteed, and for which severities?
2. Who classifies severity, and how can it be challenged?
3. What cover exists outside working hours, and who actually answers?
4. What happens, concretely, when the SLA is missed?

A good sign: a provider that offers to report SLA compliance every month, without being asked, has confidence in what it signed.

DataRoad - IT Services and Consulting works with contracted, measured and reported service levels, adjusted to each client's criticality, within its IT Unlimited managed IT services. Response times are immediate, and cover for nights, weekends and public holidays is part of the Premium 365 plan.

Want to compare the SLA you have today with the one you should have? Request a no-obligation proposal. More than 10 workstations · support contract · remote, on-site and telephone support.