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Service Check Points and Guidelines

Written by: Andy Marken

Article Overview: What to consider and evaluate when developing SLAs with your communications provider.

Service Check Points and Guidelines

Regardless of whether you are contracting for Intranet or Extranet VPN services, T1/T3 service or Web hosting, closely examine the providers:

* Customers -- Evaluate whether you are working with a wholesale provider, retailer, business or consumer provider. What are their core competencies and their competition? What size businesses can they/do they support?

* Coverage -- Having only a few points of presence or a million isn't important if the ISP isn't where you and your customers are. Just as important as points of presence is the organization's ability to provide the "last mile or last quarter mile" of connectivity. If your target customers are national
* Service Offerings -- Look at their core -- high-speed transport and congestion control -- and their edge -- access, adaptation and concentration of services into the core – architectures. Determine their ability to provide multiple services (ATM, SONET, Frame Relay, Web management facilities, analog modem, video conferencing, multiple types of DSL, etc.).
* Customized Services -- Today's IS and network managers are pressing for tiered VPN service levels. Ultimately you will want to be able to specify and easily arrange for bandwidth-on-demand, RSVP connections, pre-allocation of bandwidth for groups and other services.
* Infrastructure Investment -- While it isn't absolutely vital that the ISP be facilities-based, control or influence over the infrastructure and services is important. Leading ISPs invest heavily in all areas of their infrastructure to keep pace with business' expectations. Network managers require very granular control over their connectivity and ISPs need to understand these needs and meet them.

* Stability -- Determine how long the firm has been in the IP business. Are they in the business for the long haul? Quality networks aren't built on a shoestring budget. Service pricing may look attractive, but as time passes, hidden costs and price increases could make you realize that you have made a mistake.

* Customer Monitoring -- Over the years, corporate management have become very sophisticated in managing and cost-justifying their investments. This means they need a detailed view of their Internet-based services, including real-time and historical performance and utilization data. This data helps verify contracted service levels, carry out realistic and reliable capacity planning, and adjust their business operations.

* Customer Care -- When a company moves its business to the Internet, it is really entrusting its communications technology jewels to the service provider. How well the provider delivers customer care should be a prime concern. It is important to choose a provider that automates some of the lower level tasks so their staff is available to provide higher levels of customer support activities with your organization.

* Web farm architecture and capacity -- Like its Internet service, the Web farm architecture should be fully redundant to ensure that there is no single point of failure. Multiple SuperSites that are served by at least three high-speed circuits, connecting them to other Internet backbone nodes or Network Access Points, provide increased reliability because alternate routing paths can be used if one path is disabled.

* Network topology. Direct connection to the backbone is very important, because more hops to the Internet create more potential points of failure. The provider should be directly connected to the nation's largest and most critical exchange points as well as have private peering relationships with every other major service provider with at least OC3c service.

* Peering relationships. To ensure voice, data and video communications as well as global content distribution, the provider should have private peering arrangements with all of the other major providers, at least 3 critical exchange points plus a major global network or significant partnerships with overseas networks

* Bandwidth availability. Availability for direct connections is measured as a percentage of the ISP's network uptime. This should never be less than 99.5 percent. Fractional T1 and T1 connectivity is certainly less expensive than dedicated lines that can support traffic-intensive periods. However, sluggish performance and downtime cannot be tolerated when the Internet is a critical part of your business.

* Plans for network bandwidth growth. Determine the relationships the company has with other major national and international network providers as well as the firm's schedule for implementing next-generation technology.

* Redundancy. A local disaster at the NOC site should not interrupt your service. In addition to having a backup power generation, the NOC should be duplicated at other sites to avoid failure at a single point.

* Uptime Safeguards -- They should have seasoned personnel on-site around the clock, seven days a week. Answering services and the ability to page a support person is not the same as a fully staffed, 'round-the-clock operation. The NOC should be constantly testing each link of the network to provide proactive service to identify and solve a problem before it affects your business.

* Experience. Determine how much experience the organization has in managing high-traffic Web sites and the volume of their most active sites. Ask for references in your area of business.

* Additional services. In addition to Internet connectivity, there may be other Internet and Web-related services you will want and need. This can include usage statistics reporting, customer order-taking, credit card payment support, e-mail account management, list servers, e-mail auto response, FTP archives, local newsgroups, custom newsgroups, network management, security services, on-line chat and other advanced capabilities. Make certain that the ISP is experienced in, and able to support, the additional services you need.

* Available tools. What tools are available for managed server services? You need to determine if the company has the programming tools, databases, interfaces, applets and add-on options such as EC/EDI and secure transaction capabilities available. In addition to making these tools available, how experienced is the staff in using these them?

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