Recovery Planning for Service Contract Compliance

Setting the Standards for Service Providers

A Service Contract or Service Level Agreement between a service provider and customer agrees the standards required for service delivery. The Contract defines agreed service levels, penalties for failure to meet the agreed levels, performance incentives and support structure. An Service Contract guarantees quality of service for the customer.

Outage Penalties

Penalties incurred for failure to meet the agreed service contract levels during a business or communications outage will exacerbate the losses resulting from lost business and client dissatisfaction. An effective recovery plan minimizes or even avoids any interruption to business service levels and is often included in service contract compliance.

The customer will seek assurances that the service levels are likely to be maintained and a comprehensive and efficient backup to any vulnerable business systems will go a long way to providing that reassurance. A customer may insist upon evidence of the service provider's capacity and resilience as well as an effective disaster recovery plan.

Service Uptime Expectations 99.9% is a common requirement of a Service Level Agreement. With the increasing complexity and consequent fragility of business systems and the technologies behind them, integrating effective resilience into business structures is essential. Business and Communications infrastructure needs to be able to cope with periods of peak activity and high demand with some headroom, but when an outage occurs and in-house systems have failed, a disaster recovery plan will maintain business continuity and help meet the terms of the Service Contract.

By outsourcing the DR mechanism the customer is provided the necessary assurance and at a cost well below that incurred by any downtime.

Agreements Covering Communications

Telecoms service levels often specify percentages of calls abandoned while waiting to be answered, percentage of calls answered within a set time, average time taken for a call to be answered and service availability.

Telecoms systems are usually complex and susceptible to failure and as such communications service providers need to provide strong reassurances within a service contract. A hosted telecoms disaster recovery and business continuity solution can provide backup for unforeseen emergencies and outages and also be used during scheduled maintenance and to handle over capacity traffic during periods of high communications demand.