Practical Service Level Management: Delivering High-Quality Web-Based Services

Overview of Service Level Management

Often, one group's service provider is another group's customer. It is critical to understand that service delivery is often, in fact, a chain of such relationships. As Figure 2-1 shows, some entities, such as an IT group, can play different roles in the service delivery process. As shown in the figure, a hosting company can be a customer of multiple service providers while in turn acting as a service provider. An IT group may be a customer of several service providers offering basic Internet connectivity, application hosting, content delivery, or other services. Customers may use multiple providers of the same service to increase their availability and to protect against dependence on a single provider. Customers ...