Describe Service Level Agreements
Microsoft 365 has aservice-level agreement (SLA) attached to it. An SLA details the service provider’s commitment to providing a defined level of availability and reliability. Microsoft 365’s SLA for operation includes 99.9% availability, excluding scheduled downtimes (typically, this is for service upgrades).
Service-Level Agreement Features
Microsoft provides a mechanism to refund a portion of your bill as service credits should they fail to meet the SLA.
Microsoft’s SLA identifies a few important notes about claims:
- Claims must be submitted to Microsoft’s customer support and should include details of the service outage, such as the timeline and duration, the number of users and locations affected, and the steps you took to resolve the issue.
- Claims must be received by the end of the calendar month, following the month where the incident occurred (for example, if the incident occurred on March 15, the claim must be received by April 30).
Microsoft also puts some boundaries and limitations around fulfilling their SLA, such as your organization failing to take necessary actions (for instance, neglecting to disable someone’s access or unauthorized access, resulting in you failing to follow good security practices), misuse of the services, loss of network connectivity, or acts outside of your control (such as natural disasters or war).
The SLA guide provides a few key terms and definitions as listed in Table 13.3 that are used throughout:
Table 13.3 – Terms and definitions
In addition to the general 99.9% uptime that the Microsoft 365 service advertises, Microsoft also provides guidance on how service credits will be apportioned, given the number of outages that occur. This is done on a per-service basis, as shown as shown inTable 13.4:
Table 13.4 – Service credit table
SLA updates
The Microsoft 365 SLA guide is regularly reviewed and updated. You can access the detailed SLA guide at https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/docs/view/Service-Level-Agreements-SLA-for-Online-Services.