"It's often a perception issue," says Greg Davoll, senior director of data protection marketing at Quest Software. "The five 9s may be being met for the IT SLA contract, but when the user logged in at 10:30 pm on a Friday night expecting to use the service, it wasn't available. It may even have been down for scheduled downtime. The end user may not understand that there's scheduled downtime and it's part of the contract."

Those problems can be solved with better planning and better communication, Davoll says. He suggests that organizations define their SLEs before negotiating their SLAs. But when services or applications go down unexpectedly, a plan for recovery that focuses on the applications is even more important.

Application recovery remains a tricky process with many incremental and highly manual steps, Davoll says. He notes there are three factors that make application recovery challenging.

First, he says, not all apps are the same. Some are mission-critical while others are not as essential.