The Basics

Our SLAs depend on the agreed hours cover and the priority of your issue or request.

We can provide bespoke SLAs to suit your needs – extended hours of cover (24x7x365, weekends, public holidays), different speeds of response, priority, or cover for different types of equipment.

Standard Hours of cover

While many clients have extended and out-of-hours of support, our standard cover runs from 8:30am to 5:30pm from Monday to Friday but excluding public holidays for England.

Our monitoring services run 24x7x365 and major issues are dealt with by our out-of-hours on-call team.

Our SLA timers run only during your agreed hours of cover.

How we work out priorities

Our SLA timers also depend on the priority of your issue or request. When you raise a ticket with us, we make an assessment based on the information you have given us.

We let you know the priority we have assigned, but are happy to adjust this to fit with your priorities e.g. key user issues requiring higher priority.

Priority is based on two factors: urgency and impact.

Urgency – Roughly, this is how many people are affected by the incident, e.g.

            LOW – One person or small group of people affected.

            MEDIUM – Department or large group of people affected.

            HIGH – Whole organisation is affected.

Impact – Again, roughly speaking, this relates to how disruptive the incident is, e.g.

            LOW – There’s an easy and effective workaround, so this is more an irritation than a stoppage

            MEDIUM – Ooperational efficiency is degraded, but there is either a reasonable workaround or other members of the team are unimpeded

            HIGH – The issue is critical and one or more major business processes are stopped

We then apply our priority matrix as follows:

In our experience most issues fall into priority 3, so that tends to be a default. The priority assigned dictates the amount of time we give ourselves to deal with your incident or request.

Overriding our priorities

We are flexible and recognise that sometimes there are extenuating circumstances. Perhaps the issue affects your customers, or key staff are having issues with a critical project with an impending deadline.

Our team are able to override our standard priority assessment if you have made us aware of it.

These timers represent maximums – we generally come well within these time limits.

In certain circumstances we will put a clock on hold – for example when we are awaiting a response from you with further information or an approval for work that may have a temporary impact on you or your business.

“Respond within…”

This is the maximum amount of time (within your hours of cover) that it should take us to get back to you and confirm who is initially dealing with your ticket – you get to speak to a trained technical expert straight away, rather than a recorded menu system or a call-logger.

“Resolve within…”

This is the one that everyone is really interested in: the maximum time it should take to get everything up and running.

Some examples of priorities

Priority 1 –
nobody can send or receive emails (everyone is affected, and a major business
process is stopped)

Priority 2 – Internet access for the whole
company seems slower than usual (everyone is affected, and efficiency is
degraded)

Priority 3 – After a software upgrade for
the company some of the desktop shortcuts have disappeared (everyone is
affected but there is an easy workaround)

Priority 4 – Your computer is slow starting
up in the morning, but everybody else is fine (your efficiency is lower but
you’re the only person affected)

Priority 5 –
Someone is missing the shortcut everyone has to a shared folder, though they
can save files to it by manually navigating to the folder (there’s a
straightforward workaround, and only one person is affected)

Other exceptions to our priorities

The following are exceptions to our priorities and timers in the
above matrix:

Paid workshop repairs – very often we’re dependent on supply of parts or arrangements
with you for collections and returns, so we usually allocate a priority of 5
for these jobs however depending on situation the time to repair/replace an
item can be weeks. The P5 gives us a target of 5 working days not including any
time the ticket is “With User” or “With Supplier” or similar statuses where
Cloud10 are not working on the ticket.

Quotes –
we have no timers on these requests, but we do our best to be prompt and keep
you fully up to date.

Low priority admin requests – these have response times that match priority 4 but a resolve
time of a priority 5. Generally, we get plenty of advance notice and these
requests are not urgent.