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Showing posts from April, 2008

The SLA Lesson: software bug blues

I have been hugely busy in the past weeks with several projects, so the blogging got stuck... I will try to avoid this in the future. Now back to my latest experience Part of every Information Security Management System is the incident management process. It is as process in which the company identifies a problem which is occurring or has occurred, and performs steps to contain it, minimize the impact, identify the root cause and take measures to prevent the incident from recurring. The incident in question is a dreaded application blocking - a company of 1000 employees uses a custom made fully integrated CRM/ERP system, which exhibited complete or partial non-responsiveness of several minutes for a period of nearly two hours. This situation was identified at several departments, while the rest of the company is functioning as usual. As soon as the call came in, the incident response team was formed and the problem was analyzed. After 15 minutes, the problem was identified. Accou

9 Things to watch out for in an SLA

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I wasn't planning to touch the issue of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for some time, but it appears that the incident report (Link to Blog Post) has stirred attention that merit a post on the subject. As i already mentioned, it is a very frequent occurrence that the SLA is just an afterthought when preparing a contract, and that the buyer is usually waiting for the supplier to produce the SLA agreement. Of course, this leads to the situation in which the SLA actually protects the supplier, not the buyer.So here are the items one must do to achieve at least a reasonable if not good SLA Remember that any SLA is open for negotiation, but only in initial purchase - although the supplier may propose a very rigid position on the SLA (especially common in large companies), the SLA is part of the sales process. Standing by a rigid position should immediately raise red flags that the proposed "unchangeable" SLA is protecting the supplier, not the buyer. So the best oppor