Reports in recently months have argued that service-level agreements (SLAs) can often be the bane of service providers who are not used to delivering the benefits they promise.
One of the big issues facing companies at the moment is how to cope with growing IT workloads with the same staff numbers, according to Mike Marks, director of service provider product marketing at software vendor Concord Communications.
Marks said the decision to outsource may be made by companies because, in addition to cost savings, projects would otherwise go unstaffed.
But he argues that CIOs and IT managers need to push for SLAs which go beyond the traditional measurements of performance. SLAs are typically used as a standard by which an enterprise evaluates its outsourcing partner, he said.
Marks believes that service providers should be providing the enterprise with additional information, such as where extra protection is needed, or what are the busiest parts of the network.
"Service providers are not doing a good job of that and their business customers aren't really insisting on it yet," Marks said. "But we feel this is something CIOs considering outsourcing should be insisting on--performance information, other than the service provider telling them how well they did in the past."
