SLA Magic:
Now You See It, Now You Don’t
Now You See It, Now You Don’t
Ever feel like the promised 99.9% availability from your cloud provider is more of a magic trick than a solid promise? Let’s pull back the curtain on what really doesn’t count in those calculations—things like network access, any of your enterprise infrastructure, and anything Microsoft decides is beyond their control like alien invasions, zombie apocalypses, or, more mundanely, natural disasters.
When you tally up all those exceptions, your golden 99.9% suddenly looks more bronze-age. It’s not criticism, just a reality check on what that uptime really means for your operations.
Take this little scenario: A recent hiccup in service lasted about nine hours. In the grand theater of a 30-day month, that translates to 540 minutes out of a possible 43k and change—dropping your actual uptime to around 99%. What’s the prize for this uptime roulette? A 25% credit on your bill.
Want to hit the jackpot with a 100% credit? Brace yourself. Your service needs to be a no-show for over 36 hours. Imagine that—a day and a half of digital ghost town. Even if you qualified for that 100% credit, it wouldn’t come close to covering the losses incurred during the downtime.
And here’s the kicker: to get a full refund, your service needs to be down more than 5% of the time in a month. That’s a nightmare scenario for any operation. A 5% downtime only nets you a 50% credit back. Sound like a deal? Yet, many have signed up for this ride. The cost to your business can be significant so not getting credit back is like salt in the wound.
Chasing Down a Credit: Not for the Faint of Heart
In some utopian world, your provider might automatically flick a credit to your account after an outage. But back here on Earth, it’s likely you’ll need your IT warriors to gear up and gather the battle stats: what failed, for how long, the impact radius, user casualties, and all heroic attempts to mitigate the chaos.
Filing for this credit isn’t a leisurely stroll or is it? You’ve got a tight window to submit your claim—by the end of the month following the outage. What if you could automate this task and save your team all the hassle..now you’ve got better odds and the money that comes back is much more appealing.
Is This SLA Sideshow Worth the Ticket Price?
Let’s face it, compiling these claims is a headache your IT team doesn’t need, especially when they could be spearheading high-impact projects. Is the effort worth the payoff? You might not know until you’ve gone through the motions once. Some savvy IT leaders might decide only to jump through these hoops for outages for a meaningful payout; might as well take the ride since you already paid for admission.
