IT & Cloud
SLA
Also called: Service Level Agreement
The contractual commitment defining response and resolution targets by severity, coverage hours, and the remedy when targets are missed.
The distinction that matters is response versus resolution. A one-hour response means someone acknowledges the ticket; it says nothing about when the server comes back. Serious SLAs define severity levels with examples, separate targets for each, and state what is excluded — third-party carrier faults, end-of-life hardware, unsupported software.
An SLA with no remedy is a marketing sentence. Credits, escalation paths, and named contacts are what make it enforceable, and reviewing achieved-versus-target monthly is what keeps it honest.
Related terms
- Managed IT Services
- An outsourced model where a provider monitors, maintains, patches, and supports a company's IT for a recurring fee, rather than billing per incident.
- RTO / RPO
- Two recovery targets: RTO is how long a system may be down, RPO is how much recent data may be lost. Together they dictate what backup and failover design is required.
- Truck Roll
- Dispatching a technician to a site, and by extension the field-service programmes that deliver scheduled onsite work across many locations.
More IT & Cloud terms
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