It's important to know what software will be used for the service you have purchased. Your company may have specific requirements, such as avoiding unsupported open source software on any of your IT infrastructure. In that case, software such as Snort may be out and the service provider must use vendor-supported products .Knowing what software is used also allows you to better understand the relationship between the service provider and the software vendor. For instance, if your service provider is using Cisco PIX as the firewall software but there's no CCIE on staff, that would certainly be a cause for concern.

Service availability

Perhaps the section with which readers will be most familiar is the service availability section. This section describes exactly what the service level guarantee you will receive as a customer. For example, one of the most critical service level guarantees is uptime percentage. 99.5 percent uptime means that your site can potentially be down for 216 minutes per month without any penalty for the service provider. If the service is down more than the guaranteed level, the service provider will compensate you for that period of time . It is critical to understand what the service provider considers to be downtime. For example, most service providers will not consider upgrades to constitute service downtime; therefore, you will not be compensated for those periods of unavailability.

Other service level guarantees the agreement may specify include how fast the service provider will respond to your service requests, how long upgrades will take, how fast service providers will detect and report problems, and so fort h.Another critical consideration is how the service provider will be penalized if the service level guarantee is not met. In most cases it simply means the service provider won't bill you for that period of time.

Service requests