Glossary · IT & systems
SLA
Agreements on the availability and response time of a service.
An SLA, short for Service Level Agreement, is an agreement about the level of a service. It sets out what you can expect from a supplier: how often a system must be available, how quickly someone responds to a problem, and what happens if those promises are not kept.
The benefit is that expectations are down in black and white. Without an SLA, there is debate about what is reasonable when something goes wrong. With an SLA, you know in advance how quickly a fault should be fixed and what you can fall back on.
Pay attention to the details when you read one. A promise of a fast response says little if it is not clear what a response actually involves, or when the clock starts. A good SLA is concrete enough to rely on in practice.
