You can’t become a great IT pro without breaking a few metaphoric networking eggs. It would be great if all these mistakes happened in a sandbox environment. Unfortunately, they often happen during business operations.
“As organizations are increasingly delegating control of their network – including carrier services and service management – to third-party providers,” said Sanchit Gogia (@s_v_g), Chief Analyst and CEO, Greyhound Research, “Defining your SLAs (Service License Agreements) is the most important lesson I’ve learned. in the starting years of my company.”
The first major mistake Gogia made was not defining SLAs to the specifics. For example, one SLA he signed up for only indicated network availability to 99.99 percent. Later he realized that network latency and packet delivery would matter before bandwidth started failing. Today, Gogia has SLAs that define guarantees for network availability, notifications, latency, and packet delivery.
“It’s important that SLAs are specific to help reduce cost of ownership,” said Gogia.