An SLA is a legally binding contract between a service provider and a customer. SLAs ensure both parties clearly understand service quality expectations and the repercussions of not meeting the agreed-upon standards.

The service provider and the customer negotiate and agree upon SLAs, typically before the service commences. This is necessary to create a clear understanding of the performance and reliability expectations for the service and to safeguard the interests of both parties.

If your company is a technology vendor, providing SaaS or other services and products to customers, SLA are your business.

This means you are required to ensure performance and reliability, prevent downtime and fix issues within set timeframes. Usually, these timeframes range from immediate, in the case of urgent issues, to several hours or days.

To achieve this, most companies have on-call, incident response protocols and tools, where some developers or teams work in alternating shifts to fix production issues when they arise. How do you make sure customer SLA are met, while also keeping least privilege and preventing standing access to the most sensitive environments and resources?

Apono is here to help.

How to ensure SLA Agreements are met

Apono break glass protocols

Committed to fixing production incidents 24/7? Apono helps users create Access Flows that enable break glass protocols. This is especially handy off-hours (at night and during weekends and holidays, when approvers might not be available).

1. Enable automatic access upon request to on-call shifts and developers on-duty
2. Create bundles that represent customer environments, tenants, databases and other resources to grant to developers in case of emergency
   1. Developers can request a bundle which grants them the exact access they need to investigate and solve the issue
3. Use our webhooks solution to trigger Access Flows automatically when an incident is created in your incident response tool

👍

Learn more about Apono break glass protocol here

Access management to customer data

Apono helps you drive sales and keep customers satisfied by ensuring least privilege to customer environments and databases. This can also help prevent mistakes in customer environments, like changes to production environments, human error and confusion between tenants and mistakes, like change or deletion of data.

1. Create Access Flows around CRUD actions to customer environments and databases.
2. Make sure developers and Customer Success representatives gain such access only in case of incident that requires their attention or upon approval.

👍

Learn more about protecting customer data here

Production stability

SLA is often about how quickly your R&D team can fix production issues, but a big part of SLA is reliability.

DevOps and SRE professionals can reduce downtime risk with Apono by putting guardrails around production environments and resources.

1. Create Access Flows around CRUD actions on production environments and resources, like code repositories, instances, servers, and more. Apono provides fine-grained access management so that you can control access granularly.
2. Make sure developers gain such access only in case of incident that requires their attention or upon approval.
3. Help your developers prevent human errors. Apono access requests and access details separate different environments and prevent confusion; developers can only request the access permitted to them by Access Flows and the access request process zooms them in to the right resource or bundle for their tasks.

👍

Learn more about production stability with Apono here