Ten Questions: Signing a Service Level Agreement
Once you start to negotiate with a CDN you will observe that everything is, in fact, negotiable. You may be able to persuade a CDN that really wants your organization as a client to offer a higher SLA if you extend your commitment to five years instead of two, or if you allow them to use your pilot as a case study. If you are creative, you can get a lot of support by being open-minded during the process.
There is a possibility of over-commitment on the SLA by a CDN, and you might wind up spending more time and resources on enforcement and efforts to remediate SLA levels that cannot be met by the CDN. This can be tricky. You may find creating a benchmark study of parallel industries that have already gone through this process to be the most useful tool at your disposal.
You may presume help-desk support is inclusive within the service package outlined in the SLA, and that such components would be transparent to your organization if use of streaming media services is scaled up or down. Ensure you are supported on these levels in the SLA process and everything is specific, clear, and measurable.
If you are going to produce more "casual"—i.e., less frequent and less mission-critical—webcasts, you may prefer going with a CDN that has a standard one-page SLA posted on their website. That can be fine in most enterprise organizations, as long as the CDN doesn’t require you to sign a contract. Those CDNs are out there, but you'll have to search for them.
What level of access will the enterprise content managers have to the key systems on the CDN?
The number of places to which you can upload media files that are available to you 24/7 is important. If one goes down, be sure you have what we call hot backup, not cold or warm backup. This means that if a server goes down, there is someone at the ready to click a button to redirect your content.
New content could be lost on the CDN and you may not realize it if an older backup is restored over newer content during a brief outage. Ask your CDN engineering squad how these systems are maintained and backed up, how they will notify you, and where the reports or alerts go if there is an issue so you can make sure your latest content is available. This should be detailed in your SLA under a section that enforces performance-level guidelines.
You need full access to the primary media server to set up a live webcast or you may need to change permissions on content on the fly. The level of access you and your content managers have on the server side is critical, especially if you are producing a large volume of media.
My client group expects instant gratification when it comes to content availability. If you upload a video, you shouldn’t have to wait three hours for it to reach the edge of the CDN’s network. If an edit needs to be made to a video previously posted without changing the link, the matrix should instantly recognize and redistribute a new file once it has been uploaded.
In the real world, you may have noticed that unique-hit tracking does not happen as advertised, especially now when peering relationships between data centers and CDNs are more complex then ever before, and the reseller-like nature of the CDNs we use really creates a tangled web of mixed technologies. How can we trust that everything is streaming as expected? Answer: We can’t!
What are your peering relationships? Who’s touching my stuff?
Proximity to a CDN’s data center can enhance ease of use when uploading content and webcasts through (or around) a firewall, so ask your CDN for a global map of their network. You need to figure out where you want to host a webcast from, either primarily from your internal facilities or offsite (like from hotels or other conference venues). If your webcasts will be mostly internal, it may be best to add a dedicated fiber connection directly to the closest datacenter your CDN can provide.