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

The Need for Policies

Different factors are driving service providers and enterprises to consider implementing policy-based management systems. These factors include the following:

• Staffing costs— Economic pressures to show strong bottom line results work against the need to hire expensive expert staff.

• Growing complexity— The managed environment itself is becoming more complex as more technologies and organizations are blended into online business processes. Complexity soon outstrips the ability of staff to understand the situation and take the appropriate action within the time limits imposed by an SLA.

• Growing awareness— Service failures tend to draw media attention, risk customer loss, and make corporate management unhappy because service ...