E-Business SLA + E-Business DR Combo

SPECIAL OFFER!

E-BUSINESS SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS:
STRATEGIES FOR SERVICE PROVIDERS, E-COMMERCE AND OUTSOURCING
by Andrew Hiles

- PLUS -

GO.RECOVER-EBIZ:
DISASTER RECOVERY PLANNING FOR E-BUSINESS WEB SITE COMPUTER
OPERATIONS
by Persson Associates

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E-BUSINESS SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS:
STRATEGIES FOR SERVICE PROVIDERS, E-COMMERCE AND OUTSOURCING
by Andrew Hiles

Published by Rothstein Associates Inc.


Your customers don't care whether it is you, your ISP, ASP, or other outsourced provider who
screws up - they just know they can't do business with you when they want to. All that
matters is that your e-business is failing to deliver - and that you need to hold someone
accountable.

Meaningful Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are unambiguous, comprehensive, and
enforceable. SLAs commit suppliers to a defined quality of service: failure to meet explicit
service levels can result in penalties or even legal action.

Spectacular losses often follow e-business outages, particularly when SLAs are not in force.
The biggest hit is not necessarily loss of income or profit, but impact on stock values -
especially when markets are skittish. Some losses have exceeded $40 million with stock
values falling by 26%.

This new book offers the keys to effective SLAs with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and
Application Service Providers (ASPs), which can go a long way toward averting catastrophic
losses as well as day-to-day headaches.

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EXCERPT FROM THE PREFACE
by Paul F. Kirvan, FBCI

“With all the interest in e-business, companies large and small are jumping on the
techno-business bandwagon. While this certainly sounds like a positive trend, much awaits
the company that hopes to enter – and succeed in –the world of e-business.

“First, one must have a good business plan, one that uses a model that factors in the unique
aspects of the Internet and today's advanced networking technologies. Second, one must
understand the nuances of e-business, as it is a different world than ten years ago; customer
relationships are orchestrated and managed much differently. Third, one must have a
well-designed technology plan, one that maps precisely to the overall business plan. Both
strategic and tactical business issues must be addressed in the technology plan. Fourth,
one must have solid funding, whether from private resources or initial public offerings. Fifth,
one must have the right team members, thus ensuring the business objectives are met.
Sixth, one must be prepared to adjust expectations and business processes as the company
grows and matures. Finally, one must have a way of ensuring that the all-important
technological underpinnings of the company are able to continue functioning without
interruption.

“This last issue is where we are especially concerned in today's e-business world. It is not
enough to design and implement the most technologically sophisticated systems and
network services for a new e-business. What are really needed are programs that provide
documented assurances that equipment and network service providers will deliver their goods
on time, in proper working order, and remain in good working order. Loss of information
systems, business applications, Internet and worldwide web access, and voice and data
communications systems and networks could immobilize any enterprise.

“One of the most important ways to ensure that information systems and networks are
protected is to enact Service Level Agreements, or SLAs. These documents detail the
products and services to be provided, the expected quality and reliability of service, and the
penalties and remedies the vendor faces for failure to perform as contracted. But with all of
the nuances of e-business today, where do service level agreements fit into the overall
picture?

“This book by Andrew Hiles, an internationally respected consultant, author and educator,
provides important guidelines and insights about SLAs and how they factor into e-business.
The book is supported by anecdotal information, industry statistics, and product descriptions.
One can actually get a solid picture of how an SLA ought to fit into the grand scheme of
things.

“But this book is not just for brand-new e-businesses. Established firms that are entering the
world of e-business, as a way of expanding into new markets or growing existing ones, will
find the wisdom contained in this book especially useful.

“The worst thing to do when entering the world of e-business is to be poorly prepared. One of
the best things to do is to read this book. Use its guidance and insights. It will help ensure
that the systems you need for success are protected, thus ensuring that your e-business –
stays in business.

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION
1. Service Level Agreements: a Brief History
2 Service Level Agreements and E-services
3. Service Level Agreement — Definition
4. Service Quality - Definitions
5. The Service Level Agreement
6. Principles of Service Management
Figure 0.1: Making Service Meet Business Needs
7. Service Support Characteristics
Figure 0.2 Service Support Levels
8. Service Management Disciplines
Figure 0.3: The Service Management Toolkit
9. Availability Management
10. Performance Management
11. Capacity Management
12. Security Management
13. Change Management
14. Problem Management
15. Environment Management
16. Quality Management
17. Service Ownership
18. Point of Delivery
19. Internet-specific Issues
Table 1.1: Recent Surveys
KEY POINTS

1 THE E-BUSINESS CONTEXT
1.1 the E-business Context: the Need for SLAs
Table 1.2: E-losses
1.2 Service Level Agreement — Definition
1.3 What to Include in a SLA
1.4 Service Quality — Definitions & Metrics
Figure 1: Example of Network Availability and Response (Transit Time)
Definition
Figure 2: How Averages Can Distort User Reality - Supplier View
Figure 3: How Averages Can Distort User Reality - User View
1.5 Penalty Clauses
Table 2: Cost of E-commerce and Online Service Outages
1.6 Planning for Change
Key Points

2 SLAs for ISPs
2.1 Overview of ISPs & SLAs
2.2 America on Line (AOL)
2.3 AT&T
2.4 ISP SLAs
2.5 Psinet
2.6 Sprint
2.7 Uunet
2.8 Qwest
2.9 Cable & Wireless
2.10 Monitoring Delivery

3 SLAs FOR ASPs
3.1 Asp: Definition
3.2 Scalability
3.3 Asps - Benefits
3.4 How Viable Are ASPs?
Table 3.1: ASP Size
3.4.1 AOL
3.4.2 NetStore
3.4.3 Corio
3.5 Quality of Service
3.6 Optimization
3.7 ASP SLA Metrics
Table 3: Critical Component Analysis - Cumulative Availability
Table 4: Contacts for Monte Carlo Analysis Tools
KEY POINTS

4 SLAs FOR CLECS & OTHER *SPs
4.1 CLECS: Definition
4.2 About CLECS
4.3 Verio
4.5 Other Services; Package Hosting & Website Development
4.5.1 DataSoft
4.5.2 ClearDaze
4.5.3 Global WebNow
4.5.4 BriSpeed Technologies, Inc.
4.5.5 Intira
KEY POINTS

5 MEASURING & MONITORING *SP PERFORMANCE
5.1 Monitoring Tools and Their Use
5.2 Application Monitoring
5.3 Network Monitoring
5.4 CASE STUDY
5.4.1 Vigil
5.5 Systems Monitoring
5.6 Satisfaction Monitoring
5.7 Monitoring and Litigation
5.8 Measurement and Monitoring Tools: Summary
5.9 Web Sites

6 OUTSOURCING ISSUES
6.1 Background
6.2 Issues of Service "Ownership"
6.3 Outsourcing Disputes
6.4 Case Studies
6.4.1 Satisfactory - Info
6.4.2 AimNet
6.4.3 The Salvation Army
6.4.5 Bermuda.com
6.5 The Invitation to Tender
6.6 Analysing Quotes & Supplier Capabilities
6.7 Outsourcing Service Specifications
6.8 Outsourcing Vendor Evaluation Criteria
6.8.1 Criteria
6.8.3 Desirable Criteria
6.8.4 Preparing for Supplier Evaluation
Table 6.1: Supplier Evaluation Checklist
6.9 Handling Tenders
KEY POINTS

7 SOURCES OF HELP & ADVICE
7.1 SOURCES
KEY POINTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A: SLA FOR CACHE
A.1 SCOPE OF SERVICES AND SLA
A.1.1 Objective
A.1.2 Definitions
A.1.3 Availability
A.1.4 Support
A.1.5 Service Levels

APPENDIX B: EXAMPLE INTERNET ACCESS SLA
B.1 SERVICE: SCOPE
B.2 SERVICE LEVELS
B.2.1 Network Availability
B.2.2 Packet Loss
B.2.3 Backbone Latency
B.2.4 Outage Notification to Customer
B.3 Security Service Levels
B.4 Credits

APPENDIX C SLA FOR A MANAGED LOTUS NOTES SERVICE
C.1 SERVICE OVERVIEW
C.2 SERVICE LEVELS
C.2.1 Availability
C.2.2 Reliability
C.2.3 Response
C.2.5 Service Objectives
Table C.1: Services and Service Objectives
C.3 Credits

APPENDIX D: GLOSSARY

APPENDIX E: CUSTOMER SATISFACTION SURVEY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OTHER SLA TOOLS AND RESOURCES BY ANDREW HILES

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EXCERPT:

“INTERNET SPECIFIC ISSUES

“Internet based services, whether ISPs, ASPs or dot-coms play in a difficult and risky market.


“Time to market is deemed crucial – yet the old saying “you can have it cheap, you can have
it right, or you can have it now” remains true: at best, usually only two of those three are
attainable. At worst, two are sacrificed for speed to market. The Application Service
Providers are trying hard to prove all three can be achieved. There is danger, too, in quick
time to market – it is a matter of fact that most of those first in the market do not succeed:
the hare is overtaken by the tortoise who sees, and avoids, the pioneer’s mistakes.

“While growth of voice traffic is growing at 10% a year, IP traffic is growing at 1,000% a year.
Individual growth of a service or a supplier can be unpredictable and dramatic.

“There are many inter-relationships and inter-dependencies. To the customer, this spells
danger. While SLAs cannot by themselves ensure continuity of supplier, SLAs are imperative
with and between e-service suppliers to provide a degree of security and consistency of
service quality.

“E-business is growing and becoming increasingly an indispensable part of business activity.
Loose virtual relationships are growing alongside more formal outsourcing and contract-based
services. What is still missing, in many cases, are meaningful Service Level Agreements
(SLAs) that are unambiguous, comprehensive, and enforceable.

“Typically SLAs will cover:

- Availability timings and service levels
- Maintenance and scheduled service outages
- Reliability (i.e. number of incidents of outage)
- Packet loss
- Latency service levels
- Outage resolution times (possibly in different priorities)
- Escalation procedures (possibly in different priorities)
- Customer / user satisfaction
- Service Performance Review items.

“Key weaknesses in existing Service Level Agreements include:
- Specification of effort or targets rather than of results
- Unclear service specifications
- Unclear definition of service level metrics
- Inappropriate or misleading measurements.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ANDREW N. HILES is founder and Chairman of Survive, the international user group for
business continuity planning and was a founding Director of the Business Continuity Institute,
the international body for certification of business continuity professionals. He is a founder
Director of Kingswell, international consultants. Having commenced his management career
with the Royal Air Force, he pioneered IT systems before leaving to take up a position within
the Finance Department of London Transport. Subsequently in their Central Productivity Unit
he was a Senior Projects Manager and later became responsible for the business
re-engineering function, implementing new services and major technical projects. He left to
take up a position with the UK Post Office as their first Business Systems Consultant
responsible for major projects. Andrew then joined the UK Atomic Energy Authority at the
Harwell Laboratories where he managed the supercomputing, mainframe and other bureau
and outsourcing services. Andrew is a pragmatic consultant and trainer in the areas of
Business Continuity Planning and Service Management.

Andrew left Harwell to set up Kingswell, an international training and consulting company
specializing in service management, customer - supplier relationships and enterprise risk
management.

He has helped hi-tech, financial, transport and government bodies to develop and enhance
Customer Support and Service Desk functions and has supported both customers and
suppliers in Service Level Agreements, Market Testing and Outsourcing.

Andrew is an international speaker on service management and has featured on conference
programs in the USA, Southern Africa, Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Rim. He has
presented workshops and seminars on these topics for Frost & Sullivan (Europe), IIR/ IFF
(Europe and Gulf), AIC (South Africa), CEL (Hong Kong), UPOM (Middle East) and other
companies having also lectured at Ashridge, Cranfield, GEC Dunchurch and Henley
Management Colleges in the UK. He has broadcast on radio and TV.

He has published over 300 articles on service management and is author of two other books
on Service Level Agreements.

Andrew is a Fellow of the Business Continuity Institute, a Member of the British Computer
Society and a Freeman of the City of London.

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IN STOCK FOR IMMEDIATE SHIPMENT.

ISBN #0-9641648-9-2. 2002, 177 pages.
Also available separately (#DR590).
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GO.RECOVER-EBIZ:
DISASTER RECOVERY PLANNING FOR E-BUSINESS WEB SITE COMPUTER
OPERATIONS
by Persson Associates

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Published by Rothstein Associates Inc.
In stock for immediate shipment!
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GO.RECOVEReBIZ is specifically designed to assist people who are responsible for
developing a disaster recovery plan for e-Commerce, Internet based company applications in
an orderly and efficient manner.

While a more global computer center disaster recovery plan may include much of the
e-business related equipment, GO.RECOVER-eBIZ focuses on the specific recovery
requirements needed to implement a fast recovery of that piece of the business. In many
instances, e-business has a very short recovery expectation since any outage is immediately
evident by lack of access to the web site. Often, major corporate recovery plan activities that
could span several days are not acceptable to web based service.

The product is in effect a "template" which provides general guideline steps through each of
the ten plan sections. In a very logical order GO.RECOVER-eBIZ moves through the
development tasks including emergency response, notification, Web site incident
management, damage evaluation, equipment (Firewalls, IDS's, Load balancers, etc) and
facility documentation, Internet access (ISP's), backup Web Hosting (ASP's, Co-Location,
etc) requirements definition, offsite storage, recovery team steps, and plan testing. The
detailed, company-specific procedures and operational knowledge are inserted in the
appropriate plan sections.

In addition to the traditional disaster recovery content, GO.RECOVER-eBIZ includes some
specific web related items such as a web hosting evaluation checklist for those who need to
implement an alternate source, a web based security and recovery self-assessment
checklist, a draft web security incident management procedure, as well as some suggested
web links for additional detailed information. A part of GO.RECOVER-eBIZ includes a section
to keep track of relevant web addresses for keeping current on relevant issues, alerts, and
supporting response procedures.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
A. Read Me First
B. B. E-BIZ Disaster Recovery "Mind Set"
C. "How To" Implementation Steps
D. Plan Development "Process" Flowchart
E. Glossary of Recovery and e-BIZ Terms
F. A "Short Course" in Disaster Recovery Planning
G. Disaster Recovery Web Site References
1. Identify Recovery Leadership Team
2. Document Immediate Emergency & Notification Steps
3. Responding To A Potential Web "Incident"
4. Inventory Computer Equipment And Software
5. Inventory Network and LAN Equipment And Software
6. Document E-Biz Recovery Schematic
7. Document Offsite Storage Requirements
8. Document Backup Web Hosting Capability
9. Prepare To Test The Disaster Recovery Plan
10. Implement e-BIZ Operational Restoration

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SUPPLEMENTAL CONTENTS

In addition to the typical disaster recovery chapter content, 40 worksheets and helpful
guidelines are included. For example::
- Draft "Escalation" Procedure (Incident or Disaster or both?)
-? Draft "Damage Assessment" Procedure and evaluation form
-? A "Short Form" BIA (End User Business Impact Analysis)
-? Offsite storage "Audit" checklist
-? Offsite storage "Facility" checklist
-? Draft "Incident" management procedure
-? Basic Web Security & Recovery "Self Assessment" checklist
-? Basic Web Hosting "Levels of Service" Vendor Options descriptions
-? Pre-formatted Web Site restoration and recovery steps
-? Draft Web Hosting "Vendor Evaluation" checklist
-? A format for collecting "Web Reference" sites

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BENEFITS

-? Ease of Use: Self-explanatory, easy to use fill-in text formats provided
-? Orderly Plan development: Do-it-yourself instructions in sequence 1 through 10.
- Common PC Software: No special software to learn. Diskette/CD included with entire
product in MS Word 97 format. Easy to import/export as needed.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr. Persson has been in the Information Technology arena since 1967. He began his formal
disaster recovery involvement in 1979 following a major corporate data center "incident" that
resulted in an immediate Hot Site recovery capability. For the next 6 years he served the role
of disaster recovery coordinator helping 7 operating companies and numerous remote
locations establish their disaster recovery plans.

In 1985 Mr. Persson established his consulting practice which specializes in assisting all
size companies create disaster recovery plans. He has personally developed over 200 plans,
all of which included testing as a final step. The client base includes many businesses such
as manufacturing, financial, distribution, food service, legal, health care, recovery services
and more.

The scope of the plans that Mr. Persson has developed include mainframes, mid-range
systems, client servers, business units, networks, voice systems, and most recently
e-Business Web Servers.

In addition to authoring GO.RECOVER-eBIZ, he has also authored 2 other products for End
User Computing and for Mid-Range Computer Center Recovery, GO.RECOVER-EUC and
GO.RECOVER-MID (also available from THE ROTHSTEIN CATALOG ON DISASTER
RECOVERY, www.DisasterRecoveryBooks.com).

Mr. Persson has worked both for and with the three leading Business Recovery companies
(Comdisco, SunGard & IBM) and has been a speaker at the Disaster Recovery Journal
annual conferences. He also conducts regularly scheduled Disaster Recovery Plan
Development workshops for a major business recovery vendor. He is certified (holds a CDP
Title) by the Institute for the Certification of Computer Professionals.

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2000, Guide + CD (MS Word Format). Also available separately (#DR503)
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E-BUSINESS SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS - PLUS - GO.RECOVER-EBIZ:
Special Offer! Order #DR773.

4 Arapaho Rd.

Brookfield, CT 06804-3104 USA

1-888-ROTHSTEin; (888.768.4783)

Telephone: 203.740.7444; 888.768.4783

Fax: 203.740.7401

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