In fact, you could enter into an SLA each time you purchase any IT services from another company. At the very early stage, when you send out requests for proposal (RFP), you’d better include expected service levels as part of the request. It helps to get more appropriate offers and prices.
Then you just have to put these expectations in the SLA. Vendors usually have an SLA template for business customers. If a service level agreement is not provided by default, you always get to ask for concluding it. Especially since discussing SLA gives you room to negotiate the terms of the service.
If your company provides services on the enterprise level, you normally initiate an associate SLA to a contract. There are several
reasons why SLAs are used by many IT service providers:
- setting a mutual understanding of the service - regardless of a customer's knowledge of IT, stakeholders get clear metrics to control.
- formalizing communication - SLAs explain to both parties how to act in the event of a breach or change.
- prioritizing requests - SLAs define the urgency of incoming issues and pin aspects of the service which are the most important for a customer.
Service level agreements in the Netherlands are most commonly used in the IT industry. An SLA is also popular, in particular, for API providers, cloud service providers, Help desks, monitoring, mail delivery, and so on. There’s no closed list here, you can apply an SLA to any service it’ll be suitable for.