Lifesize Adds Cloud Video SLALifesize Adds Cloud Video SLA

Will issue credits, should unplanned service downtime fall below 99.9% availability in any given month.

A service-level agreement, or SLA, isn't something you'd associate with a cloud-based video service, but Lifesize now offers one as part of its Extreme Support plan, the company announced this morning.

The Lifesize SLA guarantees three-nines availability for video calls, which traverse highly distributed cloud infrastructure the company runs in 14 IBM data centers around the globe. Per terms of the SLA, if an enterprise with an Extreme Support plan and a current, valid Lifesize Cloud subscription experiences more than 0.1% unplanned service downtime a month and that downtime negatively impacts its business, it is eligible to claim a credit, said Michael Helmbrecht, chief product and operations officer, in an interview.

In terms of numbers of minutes, the monthly unplanned downtime allotment averages to about 43 minutes, he added. "That's not a lot of time."

As specified in the SLA, the company defines "unavailable time" as any continuous period of time lasting at least five minutes during which registered users can't sign into the cloud service and place video calls due to a problem in the Lifesize cloud. It measures that monthly downtime per subscribed account, not per individual user, Helmbrecht said.

Lifesize will not apply credits automatically based on known downtime, however. Rather, enterprises that have experienced less than 99.9% availability and have suffered negative business consequences because of the downtime must submit an SLA claim. "It's like when a tree falls in the forest," he said. "If we have an issue in Mexico City at 2:30 in the morning, we don't know if that affects you."

If Lifesize deems the claim valid, an enterprise is eligible to receive 10% of one month of subscription fees on a prorated basis, Helmbrecht said.

Since no company can be perfect all the time, Lifesize has layered in architectural elements aimed at keeping any downtime short, localized, and of little impact to an individual video caller with near-real-time failover to another connection, he added. Bolstering the Extreme Support plan with an SLA is an evolution of the company's high-availability strategy.

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