The Future of SLAs: Predictive and Outcome-Oriented

G. Barton

Summary Bullets:

• Enterprises should work with providers to develop more meaningful KPIs within SLA agreements.
• AI technology is enabling predictive fault detection; working with providers will help improve AI performance.

Service level agreements (SLAs) are one of the tech world’s necessary evils and often one of its most ineffective tools. Ideally, no SLAs should be required; enterprises would much rather have the service work than be compensated for its failure. Furthermore, the financial penalty in SLAs is often nowhere close to compensating for the financial loss caused by an outage. GlobalData’s conversations with enterprises have revealed a lack of faith from enterprises in SLAs, with more than one IT manager referring to them as ‘pointless.’