by Gary Audin

Moving to the cloud for Unified Communications (UC) and Contact Center (CC) support are certainly in the news, in blogs, and discussed in white papers and webinars. It is not a bad idea but is it a risk? The amount of risk is influenced by the Service Level Agreement (SLA) that is supported by the provider.

Read the Contract

Most CIOs are not legal experts. The contract is written with the provider’s view of what and how the services are offered. Read the accompanying documentation since the contract will most likely reference other documents.

Listening to a presentation and signing the contract without sufficient contract review can be dangerous. I suggest you record the UC and/or CC service presentation. It also puts the presenters on notice that what they promise will be referenced later if there a disputes. This will provide credible information if the service delivery is not what the business expected based on the presentation. The presenter is more careful what is promised and what is omitted from the presentation when recorded.

When You Think the Availability SLA is Not Satisfied

When the business believes that the availability SLA is not met, it should collect all the data required by the provider when applying for credit. When 99.9% is the provider goal for availability, this translates into 8 hours and 46 minutes of downtime during one year of operation. This could be one long outage or many short ones. The SLA should also include the maximum length of time that is an outage can exist in a month. Most SLAs will not specify a number. Ask your provider for their availability delivery for the last two years and how long each outage lasted. See the table below for a range of availability numbers.

What most businesses do not know is that there a number of exclusions not counted in the SLA availability calculation such as:

1. Shut-down of the operating system.
2. Loss of electrical power.
3. Network and access loss.
4. Time out for application software upgrades and fixes (can be 1–3 hours per month).
5. Preventative maintenance (hours per month).
6. The fact that some servers must be shut down for new hardware installation.
7. 7. Complete server shutdown to install operating system changes or new releases.
8. Change in VM location
9. Planned downtime

There may be more SLA exceptions so look for them in the contract. You may actually experience closer to 99.5% availability when all the above conditions are included. This does mean a cloud provider is delivering poor service. It does mean that there will be more outages than anticipated and the business cannot ask for financial credits for the excluded outages. You may also not be covered if there is a partial shutdown or a slowdown in service access times.

Meeting the Call Quality SLA

Call quality is measured using the Mean Opinion Score (MOS). MOS is numeric measure of listener satisfaction. The MOS ranges from 1.0 to 5.0 and is measured over the entire UC connection (a voice call) relating to voice quality. The provider SLA may not include the MOS. If it is included in the SLA, then 3.0 may be the specified MOS. This is a low MOS and will generate many user complaints. A MOS of 4.4 to 4.5 is what is typically experienced on the PSTN. A MOS of 3.7 to 3.8 is the quality of an average cell call. So a SLA of 3.0, which is pretty easy to deliver, does not really mean much since most listeners will have some issues with this call quality.

If the contract does include a MOS delivery number, it should be closer to 4.0 rather than 3.0. I do not think there will many credits offered for calls delivering less than a MOS of 3.0.

Look for Different SLAs by Service

Another wrinkle with SLAs is that different parts of the service may offer different availability numbers. Voice calls may have a different SLA than voicemail. E-mail, IM, and chat may have a higher SLA number than real time services like voice and video communications and conferencing.

The failure of one service may not be counted in the overall service SLA. The enterprise users could experience hours of voicemail downtime in one month. In the same month, there could be hours of downtime of video conferencing. Together they may exceed 9 hours (less than 99.9% availability) but since they are viewed as separate services, the provider can justifiably state that not a single service went down for 9 hours thereby excluding the combined outages from the 99.9% SLA requirement.

Those Other Considerations

A few other contract considerations are:

1. There may be a requirement that multiple VMs must be implemented for the SLA to be satisfied.
2. The migration time to move from a failing VM to an operating VM may not be included in downtime calculations.
3. It may be hard to prove that the failure is the provider’s not the business or its users.
4. Watch for unilateral changes to the terms of service.
5. When beta testing a service, the SLA will probably not be supported.

Applying for Cloud Credit

The service provider may at their discretion, automatically offer a credit. This has occasionally been the case. It is much more likely that the enterprise IT staff has to collect data to apply for a credit.

For a claim, the IT staff has to collect and provide:

• A detailed description of the failure
• The length of time there was a service outage
• What locations were affected
• How many users were affected
• A description of the businesses attempts to resolve the failure

The claim for credit has a limited time window. Usually the claim must be submitted by the end of the month following the failure. You may have to wait 45 days before you will be notified of the credit.

Is filling a claim is worth the effort? Producing the claim is a distraction for the IT staff from their ongoing projects. The primary question is the IT staff labor for filing a claim more than offset by the credit received? To know the answer, the IT staff may have to complete the claim anyway to see if it is worth the effort.

Conclusions

Subscribing to cloud services is very popular. The business moves from CAPEX to OPEX financing. New UC and CC services are available. Someone else has to manage the UC service not the business IT staff. It is outsourcing to a cloud data center. The business may have been given credits but the credits will not cover the internal costs, lost revenue, lost profits, and reputation. A good and fair contract can provide the C level executives some assurances that subscribing to UC and CC cloud services are worth pursuing. The business IT staff has to perform their due diligence before agreeing to the contract provision covering the SLA.

Source: TelecomReseller

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