Office 365 Service Level Agreements Updated

With the release of Office 365 in June 2011, Microsoft provided a more customer-favorable service level agreement (SLA) and more stringent disaster recovery objectives than previously offered. Office 365 is the online business productivity subscription service that features e-mail, collaboration, and communications services; it replaces the Business Productivity Online Suite Standard. New terms explain Microsoft’s commitments for service availability, ability to recover and prevent data loss in the event of downtime, and financial recompense customers can expect if an outage occurs. Microsoft’s responses to two outages since the release of Office 365, both due to infrastructure below the Office 365 services themselves, have demonstrated the company’s willingness to provide service credits to customers whose downtime has exceeded that specified in the SLA.

Terms of Service

With Office 365, Microsoft is focused on high availability as a primary objective. A new SLA gives customers a promise from Microsoft as to how the company will stand by them in the event of a service outage. Microsoft’s SLA for the Office 365 services describes the financial compensation customers can expect in the event of an outage. Microsoft’s SLA has three tiers, each corrresponding to an amount of time that the service is available in a nominal 30-day month. (See the chart “Downtime Effects on Service Credits“.)