SureCloud Service Level Agreement (SLA)
1. Reason for Policy
This document has been produced to outline the expectations of the SureCloud services with financial backing to our commitment to these service levels.
The policy ensures fairness in understanding by making clear:
- The method by which we prioritize issues.
- The expected service levels for activity related to issues.
- The credit available where we do not meet our obligations.
2. Policy Statement
The goal of this policy is to establish service expectations and informing customers of the prioritization and service levels. SureCloud’s Customer Success goal is for all customers to have a valuable and well running platform.
This policy applies to the service desk as well as platform service availability.
3. Service Level Commitment
3.a Types of service
3.a.1 Platform Availability / Uptime
The platform availability or uptime is our commitment to ensure that the platform is available for use.
Platform availability is calculated as follows:
(Total number of minutes in a month – Downtime) / Total number of minutes in a month
The figure is expressed as a percentage.
| Monthly Platform Availability / Uptime percentage | Service Credit |
| < 99.9% | 2.5% |
| < 99.0% | 5.0% |
| < 98.0% | 7.5% |
“Downtime” is defined as the total minutes per month during which the aspects of the service are unavailable, excluding planned downtime and unavailability of service.
“Planned Downtime” is defined as any period of downtime, which is communicated by SureCloud in advance. SureCloud generally schedules these out of business hours for our customers, but emergency planned downtime may be unavoidable.
3.a.2 Platform Recovery
In the event that SureCloud’s primary data center suffers a catastrophic failure, the backup data center will be brought online with the following targets.
| Objective | Target | Service Credit |
| Recovery Point Objective (RPO) | 1 minute | 2.5% |
| Recovery Time Objective (RTO) | 4 hours | 2.5% |
| Data Recovery from Backup | 2 days | – |
3.a.3 Technical Support
Issues raised through SureCloud’s service desk will be categorized as follows.
| Priority | |
| Urgent | Production system down for all users within an organization |
| High | Production system disruption for the majority of users within an organization where users are blocked or severely affected from continuing work. |
| Normal | Production system issue affecting one or more users where the designed use of the system is impeded.
User Administration |
| Low | Non-production issues of any type.
Production system issues which can be reasonably be worked around. |
| Enhancement | Issues reported which are not the intended design of the platform or application are not considered an issue and have no specific service level. |
SureCloud provide the following service levels against issues raised.
| Definition | |
| First Reply Time | The time between a ticket submitted to the service desk and the first response to the originator of the ticket from a Customer Success consultant. |
| Next Reply Time | The time between any additional comment or question and the response from the Customer Success consultant. |
| Periodic Update | The time between each Customer Success consultant update. |
| Resolution | The combined total time the ticket is open, minus waiting time for customer response. |
SureCloud will provide the following service levels in relation to technical support.
| Urgent | High | Normal | Low | |
| First Reply Time | 1 hour | 1 Hour | 4 hours | 8 hours |
| Next Reply Time | 1 hour | 2 hours | 4 hours | 16 hours |
| Periodic Update | 4 hours | 8 hours | 40 hours | – |
| Resolution | 16 hours | 32 hours | – | – |
The following credits will be offered for breaches per month.
| Urgent | High | Normal | Low | |
| First Reply Time | 2.5% | 1% | – | – |
| Next Reply Time | – | – | – | – |
| Periodic Update | – | – | – | – |
| Resolution | 2.5% | – | – | – |
3.b Service Credit Claim
If SureCloud fails to meet our service levels, you may submit a claim for a service credit.
Claims may not be made:
- When using trial or non-production instances of the platform.
- When no current license subscription is running, or there are outstanding unpaid debts.
You must submit a claim by email through SureCloud’s service desk that includes:
- A detailed description of the issue/incident, including references where known
- Information regarding the claimed breach, dates and times.
- The number and location(s) of affected users
- Descriptions of your attempts to resolve the issue/incident at the time of occurrence
Claims must be received by SureCloud, with all required information, by the end of the calendar month following the month in which the issue/incident occurred. For example, an incident on the 15th February would need to be claimed by 31st March.
SureCloud evaluates all information reasonably available and makes a good faith judgment on whether a Service Credit is owed. If SureCloud determines that a Service Credit is owed to you, we will apply owed service credit either in the form of a credit against the renewal of licenses or against future consulting services.
3.c Claim Exclusions
SureCloud evaluates all claims fairly but may exclude claims for the following reasons:
- Claims related to any cause which is beyond SureCloud’s reasonable control which shall include, without limiting the generality of the phrase, any act of God, act of any government or other authority or statutory undertaking, industrial dispute, fire, explosion, accident, power failure, flood, riot or war (declared or undeclared).
- Claims which result from the use of service, hardware or software which has not been approved by SureCloud.
- Claims where the cause is related to a failure to follow SureCloud’s advice.
- Client initiated data destruction.
- During pre-release, beta, and trial services (as determined by SureCloud).
- Any unauthorized action or inaction or from your employees, agents, contractors, or vendors, or anyone gaining access to our network by means of your passwords or equipment;
- That result from your failure to adhere to any required configurations, use supported platforms, and follow any policies for acceptable use.
