Trust Level Control: Showing Customers Some TLC

By Dave Roberts, Inkra Networks

Service level agreements (SLAs) have long been touted as the foundation for any outsourcing relationship between a customer and a service provider. By defining the expected service level and specifying remedies if an SLA is not met, hosting service providers have hoped that SLAs will ease customer fears about outsourcing relationships. But SLAs haven't created the trust that customers are seeking.

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Many service providers today offer SLAs with little or no consideration of whether their operations can actually achieve the service level promised. Many providers lack equipment that can actually perform to the levels required in their SLAs, and even fewer providers have systems that can measure compliance. Although SLAs require providers to offer discounts (or to provide free services) when services don't live up to expectations, these remedies do little to improve the customer relationship. In the end, customers want service that works, not the remedies that providers offer when they can't deliver.

As a result of these failings, SLAs have become little more than a marketing device. Because today's SLAs do not foster trust, customers have remained wary of outsourcing agreements, and most can't decide which projects to outsource and which to keep in-house.

To establish trustworthiness, service providers must supply the cost-effective, reliable, and consistent service levels that SLAs have promised, and they must be able to prove it. With reliable and verifiable services, providers can build loyal customer bases that outsource more and more services over time. Rather than SLAs, providers should focus on trust level control (TLC). And to do that, they'll need to rethink their data center architectures.

SLAs don't deliver today because providers can't consistently meet them, so hosting providers must look at new data center equipment that solves the problem as a basis of building TLC. To build TLC, providers need equipment that has the following features:

Dedicated resources: One of the primary concerns of outsourcing customers is that facilities and services be dedicated for their use alone. Providers must be able to prove that each customer's resources are dedicated, and can't be brought down by failures in another customer's resources. Although this can be accomplished with co-location cages today, such arrangements drive provider operational expenses through the roof. Rather, the data center should be based on highly integrated systems that can support multiple customers while providing the hardware and software isolation of dedicated resources.

Cost-effective redundancy: Because today's architectures rely on collections of appliances strung together, most of today's data centers nominally offer three-9's (99.9%) reliability. To ensure five-9's reliability, today's providers require their customers to buy additional redundant systems, and sometimes to locate them in different data centers. To provide high availability without penalizing the customer, integrated data center systems should provide full hardware and software redundancy.

Scalable performance: Each customer's service should scale quickly and easily to meet increasing demands. Scaling today's systems often takes weeks and requires user disruptions. But when customer trust is based on a service that always works, disruptions can't be tolerated. Data center equipment should be fully scalable without disrupting services.

Centralized management and reporting: Management is the key to reliable service and quick troubleshooting, but is very difficult in current architectures that rely on multiple appliances with separate management systems. To provide the basis for true performance reporting and to pinpoint troubleshooting, all data center services should be managed through a single system.

Customer view and control: To gain trust in an outsourcing relationship, customers must be able to see what they're paying for. Today's hosting centers issue snapshot reports on a weekly or monthly basis, but customers need real-time information to feel comfortable. If traffic suddenly slows down, for example, customers should be able to immediately see if the problem resides in the data hosting center, in a router along the path, or in the client's own network.

By taking advantages of new data center technologies, service providers can provide higher levels of service that are more reliable and more easily manageable, and can build TLC by allowing customers to monitor their outsourced systems at all times. TLC will also result in reduced churn, an easier environment in which to sell add-on services, and a growing stable of strong customer references that will accelerate business development.

About the Author
Dave Roberts is Co-founder and VP of Marketing at Inkra Networks, a builder of systems for Internet data centers. He has extensive experience in both computer engineering and marketing, having worked with a number of industry-leading firms including Nortel Networks and Bay Networks. Mr. Roberts holds a B.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.