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Virtually all Fusion products are now “Premium Grade” business services, and as such all come bundled with our Enhanced Care SLA. But what is an SLA? What does it cover and how does this protect our clients?
As in many industries, an SLA is a commitment from one party to another confirming the minimum levels of service to be expected from a particular product, hence the full title, Service Level Agreement. This is usually backed up by guarantees which can invoke penalties if the minimum service levels are not met.
Fusion works to two different SLAs:
Internal – This allies closely to our ISO 9001:2008 certification and is our own system for monitoring delivery and efficiency from the various departments. This is very wide ranging but includes timeframes for configuration and despatch of equipment, to configuring networks, through to how quickly we respond to client requests and orders.
External – This is our SLA to the customer, and focuses purely on the expected level of service for a product, specifically network uptime and guaranteed fix time. There are two levels of External SLA:
Standard Care
The title of this (derived from BT Support levels) requires some clarification, as Standard Care offers no hard guarantees at all. Standard Care carries a 40 working hour target fix (i.e. one week), but this is a target, not a guarantee. If you opt for a DSL service with Standard Care, you have no guarantees of a fix time.
Enhanced Care
Enhanced Care is included with all SDSL, EFM and National Ethernet services as standard, and can often be ordered as a bolt on to other DSL products (ADSL, ADSL2+ etc). Enhanced Care is also known as a “24 hour SLA”, as it guarantees a four hour response time and a 24 hour fix. The top premium services (EFM and National Ethernet) actually work to even more stringent internal SLAs via our wholesale partners. Prolonged faults (indeed, faults of any kind) are extremely rare with these services but virtually all issues identified are rectified on the same day, and nearly always within the SLA period.
Your commitment
As the SLA is an agreement, you as the customer have certain commitments to adhere to for the agreement to remain valid. These include reporting the fault as soon as identified, availability for testing/site visits (a 24 hour SLA may include an engineer visiting site in the early hours, somebody must be available to grant access) and your availability to test once fixed – it would be difficult to claim on an SLA if you reported the fault then went on a weeks holiday for example! Any issues affecting site access, availability for testing etc may "pause" the 24 hour clock, and therefore extend the SLA period.
Compensation
If an incident is not rectified within the agreed 24 hour period on an Enhanced Care circuit, we will apply a day’s credit against your service. Typically, this credit will continue until the fault is repaired (as long as your commitments within the agreement are met). It is important to note that no SLA from any ISP will cover for loss of earnings nor any other other additional broader compensation such as costs, expenses etc. As with the insurance industry, a relatively small monthly service payment (“premium”) is not likely to allow for cover of a claim worth potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds. There may however be means of mitigating against this worst case by discussing with your existing business insurer. Similarly, you may wish to safeguard against this risk as much as possible by investigating backup, failover or managed Fusion options (see below).
Will an SLA guarantee 100% uptime?
Unfortunately even the most cast-iron service guarantees need to allow some time for fault diagnosis and repair, as well as some minimal downtime built into the terms and conditions or the SLA for maintenance or network upgrades (which in the long term of course will help maintain your ongoing service uptime!).
The best way to optimise uptime is to consider backup and failover options. The most reliable failover option is to mirror the existing service with a second service through a diverse path. This may be a second Ethernet or EFM line or, at a more fundamental level, an ADSL line configured to take over as soon as an issue is identified on the main line. Obviously, failing over to DSL is not ideal, but certainly better than failing over to nothing. This allows your business to still function while the Fusion team work on repairing your fault.
If you would like to discuss SLAs further or wish to investigate the best failover option for your business, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
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