• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Stratus Technologies-ITIC Survey Reveals SLAs are a Low Priority at Most IT Shops

Posted on: Tuesday, 18 August 2009, 08:00 CDT

MAYNARD, Mass., Aug. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a minor consideration in most IT shops -- if they're even a topic of discussion, according to a Stratus Technologies-ITIC survey of nearly 300 IT professionals. Paradoxically, this apparent indifference to SLAs comes as more revenue-producing processes in more industries depend on the ability of their IT systems and applications to achieve the higher levels of reliability and uptime.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20060313/NEM014LOGO )

The ability to define and measure SLAs enables organizations to establish metrics such as maximum allowable downtime. This ensures that the data center technology is capable of meeting the business goals. It also allows companies to track reliability and performance in order to lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), accelerate Return on Investment (ROI) and minimize risk.

Fewer than half of the companies surveyed -- 43 percent -- regularly review SLAs, while 46 percent don't review them at all. The remaining 11 percent didn't know whether they did or not. Contributing to the lack of SLA compliance is the corresponding lack of awareness on the cost of downtime and poor performance: 51 percent of the companies surveyed don't know how much a one-hour outage of a critical application costs their companies.

"Companies that don't define SLAs will be unable to track and measure the performance and availability of their mission critical applications and business processes. That means companies won't know if the reliability levels of their IT systems' performance aligns with the business needs until disaster strikes," said ITIC Principal Laura DiDio.

Survey findings

The survey revealed a pattern of high expectations, sketchy enforcement and limited executive understanding of SLAs' importance:

• 44 percent of companies surveyed "hold IT accountable for defined performance metrics," 31 percent do "when something goes wrong," 19 percent don't define performance metrics, and nine don't do anything;
• 21 percent don't measure infrastructure performance management, only five percent use client SLAs as the measurement device;
• 52 percent use unplanned downtime or a specific subset of IT systems as their barometer, but 51 percent don't know how much downtime costs; and
• only 16 percent of companies have collaboration between top executives and IT managers on internal and external SLA metrics.
  

"When you step back from all the details, the survey reveals a huge need for executive leadership on service levels," said Peter Flynn, Stratus vice president, worldwide customer services. "Whether IT is servicing internal or external customers, or both, the whole company has to be geared toward defining optimal performance, settling on the metrics to measure it, then appropriating the resources to support it. Availability is discipline, not a feature; it becomes a part of corporate culture, like quality does in the best firms."

Comments from respondents

"We cannot get our internal customers to collaborate on SLAs. It is not an important topic for them. SLAs cannot be talked about without the discussion of what an SLA costs. The business just doesn't buy into system downtime translating to huge costs. In IT we endeavor to have resilient systems, but have to do it cheaply," said an IT manager at an East Coast utility.

"No matter what systems we have in place, our sales team will promise a customer anything to get the contract, even if it means losing money as we cannot keep within the promised contracted SLAs. To them and the wider business, it is more important to have the 'major' contracts run at a loss, than it is to not have the contracts at all," said another IT manager.

About Stratus Technologies

Stratus Technologies focuses exclusively on helping its customers keep critical business operations online without interruption. Business continuity requires resiliency and superior availability throughout the IT infrastructure, including virtual environments. Stratus delivers a range of solutions that includes software-based high availability, fault-tolerant servers, availability consulting and assessment, and remote systems management services. Based on its 29 years of expertise in product and services technology for total availability, Stratus is a trusted solutions provider to customers in manufacturing, health care, financial services, public safety, transportation & logistics, and other industries. For more information, visit www.stratus.com.

(C) 2009 Stratus Technologies Bermuda Ltd. All rights reserved.

Stratus and ftServer are registered trademarks of Stratus Technologies Bermuda Ltd. The Stratus Technologies logo and Avance are trademarks of Stratus Technologies Bermuda Ltd. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.

Contacts: Ed Marshall Ken Donoghue Beaupre & Co. Public Relations Stratus Technologies 603-559-5816 978-461-7269 emarshall@beaupre.com ken.donoghue@stratus.com www.beaupre.com www.stratus.com

SOURCE Stratus Technologies, Inc.

Source: PR Newswire

More News in this Category