Imagine walking into an emergency room with what feels like a heart attack. The sign in the hospital reads, “We guarantee to see you in 4 hours!” After you check in, you watch as someone with a paper cut and other less serious conditions is seen before you.
I would be furious. I imagine you would be, too. This is why most service-level agreements (SLAs) are not worth the paper they are printed on. Often, they use an autoresponder to “acknowledge” the issue, thereby fulfilling their guarantee without even solving the problem.
At Kirkham IronTech, we choose to triage and ask ourselves these questions. Is it a breach or a catastrophic network failure? How many people will be affected? What is the impact on business operations? Join us in this blog as we discuss the limitations of SLAs and how we choose to operate with a support triage.
The Truth About SLAs
Simply put, a service level agreement (SLA) is a contractual agreement between a service provider and a customer outlining the level of service expected. Metrics, responsibilities, and expectations are stated in the event of an issue.
Here’s the catch: SLAs often define response time, but not resolution time. So legally, they can meet the SLA requirement by replying quickly via an auto-generated ticket acknowledgment. Even if the issue is still ongoing and has been unresolved for hours or days.
Here’s an example: say you clicked a phishing email and put in a ticket, a few minutes later, it comes back as “acknowledged”. You think all is well until you come back the next day and all of your systems have been corrupted by ransomware. Legally, your provider met their SLA by acknowledging the issue, but by doing so, they are treating a ransomware attack the same way they would treat a printer jam. No urgency. No follow-up. No immediate action.
As we’ve seen in our industry, SLAs often set expectations but have limitations when it comes to solving a problem. Instead of thinking, how can we achieve this set percentage of tickets answered? We should be asking ourselves, how can we provide the best quality service for our clients? Our clients don’t care about quick acknowledgments; they care about protecting their business and sensitive data. That’s why we choose to triage.
What a Support Triage Really Looks Like
Instead of giving our clients an automated response to their tickets, we triage. This means we assess the situation in real time and take action based on urgency and business impact. Our process follows this priority framework.
- Red-Emergency: We classify a red event as a wide-scale outage or critical security event. Something where the entire organization is impacted and productivity is severely compromised. An example may be a server that went down and caused a complete loss of network activity.
- Orange-Very Urgent: Orange would be something such as an outage or security event impacting multiple employees, but not the entire organization. If a switch failure caused one side of a facility to no longer have an internet connection, we would classify that as orange. Another example may be a ransomware event impacting only a limited number of individual workstations.
- Yellow-Urgent: A yellow event is something that impacts multiple users but doesn’t fully limit their productivity. If a user requires a password reset because they forgot it may be one such case.
- Green-Routine: Routine, or green events, are ones that impact just a single user but are still able to operate relatively normally. This can be something as simple as a printer not being able to pair with their device.
We opt to use a support triage, it gives our company the ability to provide comprehensive, secure, and reliable support that fits the needs of our clients. Our goal is to provide a fast resolution to any technical issues, so you can focus on your important day-to-day operations.
Don’t Let SLA Promises Put You Last
Back to our emergency room metaphor: Would you trust a hospital that sees patients based on when they’re checked in and not how serious the condition is? That’s how SLA-driven support works. It prioritizes response time but does not give a solution to the problem. We believe that businesses deserve more than to wait in a generic queue whenever every second counts.
At Kirkham IronTech, our support triage goes beyond what regular SLAs have to offer. We operate using our IronTech Framework®. Combining cybersecurity, infrastructure, and governance to deliver holistic, prioritized support that keeps your business secure and running efficiently.
Our goal isn’t to just acknowledge threats. It’s to stop them.
Ready For a Partner That Triages?
Call Us: (479) 434-1400 – Get in contact with our team of cybersecurity experts.
Visit Our Website: www.kirkhamirontech.com – Discover our wide range of services.
Email Us: info@kirkhamirontech.com – Let us help your business today.
Tom Kirkham brings more than three decades of software design, network administration, and cybersecurity knowledge to organizations around the country. During his career, Tom has received multiple software design awards and founded other acclaimed technology businesses.
