Terms of Service Policies and Agreements
The purpose of a Terms of Service (TOS) policy (or agreement) is to identify the shared goals and objectives of both parties involved in the agreement. 10 Rick Leopoldi, the owner of RL Information Consulting (itsm.info) states, “The host should agree to provide a level of service based on an agreed-to set of guidelines, while the user should agree to abide by the host’s guidelines in anticipation of being provided the desired level of service.” 10
The host’s responsibilities should include (according to Leopoldi) 10
- Availability of the service to the user;
- The performance target of various components of the user's workloads;
- Bounds of guaranteed performance and availability;
- Measurement and reporting mechanisms
- Cost of the service (where cost is an agreed-to component of the service level agreement).
The terms of service can include a section that is specific to the level of service that you are offering. This level of service usually includes information about outages. A user’s requirements of the hosting company could encompass a broad list of services and support. These could include: reasonable maintenance outage times (e.g. the middle of the night), backup services, system recovery time, incident & disaster recovery time and sometimes for the larger contracts there might be hardware and software vendor response times.