There is no specific ALS for the “phone system” and related PSTN services such as Auto-waiting cloud and call queues. The cloud is a rapidly changing industry and vendor offerings can change. If offers change, SLAs can also be changed. As a general rule, ALS explains whether a provider should notify customers of a change of service or ALS or whether customers should be prepared for a service outage. However, it may vary from provider to provider and service service to find out if customers are informed of the changes. If a sudden change in a service would affect your workload, make sure your provider informs you of these changes. Microsoft will inform customers of so-called “disruptive changes” to its commodities, says Donald Retallack, vice president of research at Directions on Microsoft, a consulting firm. Microsoft defines “disruptive changes” as “changes in which a customer or administrator must take steps to avoid a significant deterioration in the normal functioning of the online service.” Microsoft promises to notify customers six months before a disruptive change to its Dynamics CRM platform. However, other uninterrupted changes may occur without Microsoft informing customers. Many Microsoft services have a 99.9% (three-nine) operating time guarantee.
Sounds good. But to increase 99.9% of the year, still allows 8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per year without violating the ALS. How would you feel if your workload is not available for 8 hours a day? This service computer can help users predict how much downtime they need to expect from their provider, based on their SLA operating time warranty. However, this episode illustrates the need to understand all the conditions of the cloud-SLA. Enterprise agreements can be complicated, which is why these are 10 things to watch out for when checking SLAs for Microsoft Office 365 (the SaaS offer) and Microsoft Azure (including IaaS and PaaS components). Many of these tips are also valid for other cloud platforms, z.B. AWS, but they are specially designed for Microsoft Cloud Services. Check out Microsoft`s Azure IaaS SLA operating time guarantees here.
SLA online services are available here. After the outage, IT executives crouched down and filed a request to violate the company`s Service Level Agreement (SLA), which guarantees that Office and other online microsoft services will be available 99.9% of a given month. If the service is available for less than that, a 25% credit can be issued to customers. But the response they received from Microsoft surprised them: web access was still available, so the service was not technically available and therefore it was not a violation of ALS.