Managed Security Services

Survey of Managed Security Service Providers:
Sidebar on Service Level Agreements

Most firewall services are accompanied by Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that specify certain procedural or health and performance metrics. Provider SLA responses are briefly summarized in our table, but actual SLAs are carefully-written contracts.

by Lisa Phifer VP Core Competence, Inc. [May 16, 2003]

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a written, contractual promise to deliver services that meet or exceed clearly-defined parameters. For example, Genuity supplied us with the following Service Level Guarantees (SLGs) for its SITE PATROL Managed Security Services:

Management SLG: For customer change requests received and authenticated by 6 P.M. local time, Level 3/Genuity offers a service level guarantee that configuration or policy changes will be completed by close of Level 3/Genuity's next business day. All such change requests must be made through Level 3/Genuity's Customer Service Online system. The Management Service Level Guarantee ("Management SLG") applies to modifications of existing policies only. Coverage by the Management SLG will commence after the initial 30 days of service. If, at any time during the month, a customer requested change for supported services is not completed by close of Level 3/Genuity's next business day following authentication of the request, the customer will be eligible for a 1/30th credit of the monthly service fee for the policy in question. A customer is eligible for up to 30 credits under the Management SLG in any given calendar month, a maximum of 1 per calendar day.

Monitoring SLG: The Monitoring Service Level Guarantee ("Monitoring SLG") provides the operational assurance that enterprises require by backing our SIRR and event management processes. It assures all customers reimbursement of 1/30th of their monthly Site Patrol service fees for any calendar day that Level 3/Genuity fails to respond to customer requests or network events according to the following schedule:

Severity Level	Mean Time to Respond
Severity 0	15 minutes
Severity 1	1 hour
Severity 2	1 business day
Severity 3	4 business days

Maintenance SLG: All Site Patrol customers are eligible for a Maintenance Service Level Guarantee ("Maintenance SLG") of 99 percent daily availability. For Site Patrol High Availability customers, daily availability of the covered gateways is guaranteed at 100 percent. Level 3/Genuity defines availability as the ability of a security gateway to accept connections and pass traffic 99 percent of the time for a given calendar month. The functionality and connectivity of individual client software and end-users is not covered by this guarantee. If Genuity determines that Site Patrol system failure was responsible for the outage, the customer will receive a service credit equal to 1/30th of the monthly service fees for the failed device(s). A customer is eligible for up to 30 credits under the Maintenance SLG in any given calendar month, a maximum of 1 per calendar day.

—Genuity Managed Services, A Level 3 Communications Company, April 1, 2003

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