SLA
Service Level Agreement
In short
An SLA is the part of a service contract that makes «we will look after it» measurable: how quickly someone responds to a fault, during which hours that promise applies, and what happens when it is missed. Without those three figures it is not an SLA — it is a statement of intent wearing a technical term.
Response time is not resolution time
This is the distinction most disappointment hangs on. Response time says when somebody gets back to you. Resolution time says when it works again. Almost every contract commits to the first and almost none to the second — for a defensible reason: how long a repair takes depends on the fault, not on the provider.
What a good contract does instead is grade by urgency. A stopped business is not a broken printer, and the two must not sit in the same queue.
The number nobody reads
Service hours. «Response within 4 hours» reads well until you notice the clock only runs Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 17:00. A fault on Friday evening then gets answered on Monday lunchtime — entirely in line with the contract.
Availability of 99.9 % says just as little until it states what it refers to and how it is measured. Planned maintenance is usually excluded; that is fair enough, but it belongs in the contract rather than in a footnote.
What Swiss law adds
An SLA does not replace the statutory duty. Anyone processing personal data owes appropriate technical and organisational measures (Art. 8 FADP, SR 235.1), whatever the service contract says. And while delegating to a provider is permitted, it does not remove your responsibility (Art. 9 FADP).
In practice: a provider whose SLA never mentions data security has not contracted it away — you still carry it. Which is a good reason to read for what is missing, not only for what is promised.
How we handle it
We put response time, service hours and the escalation path in writing, and describe the urgency levels with examples rather than adjectives. What that means in practice: Managed IT and IT support.
The most useful question before signing anything: «what happens at ten on a Saturday night?» The answer is either in the contract or it does not exist.
Related terms
A term in your quote that nobody explained?
In a strategy call we translate the offer in front of you — even when it did not come from us.