Here’s why anyone running mission-critical applications needs the Idenxt “Sleep Well” Service Level Agreement.
Author: Howard M. Cohen
That’s a question we keep hearing more and more, especially as the speed of business continues to accelerate, the pace of competition increases, and the stakes grow out of proportion.
There are as many potential answers to this question as there are people in business. But if you reduce them down to their most basic foundational meaning, they all result in concern about things going wrong and then out of control, often with you finding out about it way after it happens, and perhaps too late to do anything about it.
Did reading that make you feel a familiar tingle? No surprise. We’re all concerned about that very same thing. Something breaks somewhere and you don’t find out about it until its too late to prevent damage.
A Very Likely Source for Your Insomnia
If yours is like most businesses, your data and the network it runs on are a primary source of this kind of worry. Especially if you’re using cloud services, where you feel you have even less control.
You mainly worry about things that are supposed to happen not happening, or at least not happening on time. Beyond meeting deadlines for various kinds of submissions or payments, these failures also significantly impact dependencies, future tasks that cannot happen until the process at hand is completed.
This happens most often when you have operations running at times when your IT staff is not working. This is most common in smaller to mid-sized companies where the core operation runs 24/7 but the IT staff works a standard 5-shift, 40-hour schedule. If you’re running such a company, you often worry that something is going to go wrong with the network or your software or something elsewhere in the infrastructure and you have nobody there to address it. You imagine scores of employees sitting idle waiting for service to be restored.
You also dread that phone call in the middle of the night asking you to help get someone on it.
At Times, You WANT to be Awakened!
Our service, Idenxt, maintains the vigilance required to immediately detect when something is not the way it should be. It could be an error on the network, a failed service, an application throwing an exception, or any of many other possible problems.
When such an anomaly or error is detected, Idenxt goes about resolving it immediately. In some cases, our automated systems will identify and rectify the issue. In others it will alert the Idenxt team to address the issue. When issues are addressed in this manner, you will see them listed in the next report you receive from us.
If resolution requires that we consult your software developers, we will reach out to them for assistance. If there’s an Azure error, we contact Azure immediately. Whatever resource is required, if you’ve given us contact information and credentials we’ll get into contact with them immediately.
The Exception
Only when a problem cannot be resolved immediately will we call you, and you will want that call!
You want that call because it gives you the chance to make arrangements for all the other processes and systems that are dependent upon the failed process.
Now, knowing you will be made aware if a problem arises that cannot immediately be resolved, you can finally sleep soundly, no longer worrying about the consequences of a problem you don’t know is happening. Now you know.
And those calls should seldom happen.
The Idenxt “Sleep-Well-SLA”
This is why we developed our service level agreement (SLA) around how well it lets you sleep. Other SLAs may assure a Quality of Service (QoS). Ours promises a Quality of Sleep.
To learn more, contact us here.