Thursday, April 02, 2009

Setting the requirements of an SLA

Steps IT organizations must take to meet the key requirements of an SLA
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Spotlight Story
Setting the requirements of an SLA

Steve Taylor By Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler
The last newsletter discussed some of the political challenges associated with creating an internal service-level agreement for the performance of the company's key applications and services. This newsletter will address some of the steps IT organizations must take in order to ensure that it is able to meet the key requirements of that SLA. Read full story

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.

Related News:

The need to focus Last week in Denver, Network World hosted an event entitled 'IT Roadmap conference.' At that conference Jim moderated two tracks - one track was on Network Management and the other was on Application Delivery. The overall conference was very interactive with a lot of dialogue amongst end users, industry analysts, and vendors. That dialogue highlighted the fact that in 2009 IT organizations need to focus even more than they do in normal economic times. With that in mind, this newsletter and the next two newsletters will discuss the need for IT organizations to focus on a handful of key applications.

Establishing SLAs for key applications The last newsletter highlighted the fact that the dialogue at Network World’s recent IT Roadmap conference in Denver emphasized that the challenging economic environment puts pressure on IT organizations to focus even more than they do in normal economic times. With that in mind, this newsletter will begin to outline a process that IT organizations should follow in order to focus on a handful of key applications.

Are SLAs worthwhile? The last newsletter discussed the fact that the conventional wisdom in our industry is that IT organizations need to offer service-level agreements internally within their company. That newsletter also pointed out that in many cases the SLAs IT organizations get from their WAN service providers are not that impactful and raised the question of what should IT organizations do differently to ensure that their internal SLAs are impactful. This newsletter will provide a part of the answer to that question.

Managing BUM expectations The last newsletter discussed the fact that the conventional wisdom in our industry is that IT organizations need to offer SLAs internally within their company. That newsletter also pointed out that in many cases the SLAs that IT organizations get from their WAN service providers are not that impactful and raised the question of what should IT organizations do differently to ensure that their internal SLAs are impactful. This newsletter will provide a part of the answer to that question.

Ensuring that SLAs are worthwhile There is a lot of buzz in the industry right now indicating that IT organizations should offer internal service-level agreements. In most cases, this buzz skips right over most, if not all of the challenges associated with that task. This newsletter is the next installment in a series of newsletters that is focusing on how IT organizations can successfully offer internal SLAs.

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04/02/09

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