As we shall see, the measure of quality has many dimensions. SLAs are not built to protect just the consumer. Indeed, an ASP should seek to explicitly define it s own SLAs such that there is no ambiguity or misunderstanding if a problem should arise. From the consumer s point of view, an SLA binds an ASP to levels of service that are acceptable to her own business. This does not mean that SLA should be tightened as much as possible beyond reasonable means, but that a level of expected service is guaranteed.
Different businesses have different requirements.
The level of expected service is different depending on the business you may be in. We ll start with a couple cases to illustrate this.