SAP Cloud SLAs: How to Negotiate Uptime, Support, and Penalties
Introduction
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in SAP cloud deals might seem like fine print, but they can make or break your operations.
When a critical SAP system goes down, every minute of downtime means lost revenue, stalled productivity, and potential reputational damage.
Studies have pegged enterprise downtime costs at hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, not to mention the customer frustration and firefighting it triggers. This is why nailing down a robust SLA is non-negotiable for mission-critical SAP workloads. Read our guide to SAP Contract Terms & Clauses to Negotiate: Protecting Flexibility and Reducing Risk.
Yet SAP’s standard cloud SLA is often a low-bar offer. “Standard” might guarantee some uptime and basic support, but it rarely provides enough assurance for high-stakes business processes.
If you accept it at face value, you may be left with excessive allowable downtime and limited recourse in the event of issues.
In this guide, we’ll explore how to push beyond SAP’s boilerplate SLA.
We’ll cover five key dimensions of negotiation – uptime commitments, service credits, support responsiveness, monitoring transparency, and remedies for chronic failures – so you can safeguard performance and hold SAP accountable.
Let’s dive into what SAP provides by default and how to obtain the stronger guarantees your business needs.
1. Standard SAP SLAs: What You’re Offered by Default
Before negotiating improvements, it’s essential to understand SAP’s standard SLA terms. Typically, SAP cloud services (whether RISE with SAP S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba, or others) promise an uptime of around 99.5% for production environments.
In plain language, 99.5% availability allows for about 3.6 hours of downtime per month. Some newer SAP offerings, such as RISE private cloud, advertise a 99.7% uptime, but this still results in a few hours of downtime per month.
Non-production systems usually have even lower guarantees (e.g., 95% uptime for test systems). Crucially, these percentages often exclude scheduled maintenance windows, meaning SAP can take the system down for updates without counting that against the SLA. For a mission-critical system, a 99.5% uptime promise – and potential hours of unplanned downtime – may not inspire confidence.
SAP’s default remedy for missing the uptime target is modest service credits. If they fall short of the SLA, you typically can claim a small credit toward your subscription fees. However, the credits are usually symbolic.
For example, an SLA might state you get 2% of your monthly fee back for each 1% drop below the uptime guarantee, capped at perhaps one month’s fees.
In practice, if SAP only delivered 98.5% uptime in a month (1% below target), you might get a ~2% credit on that month’s bill. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the business impact of the downtime.
The standard credits are designed not to hurt SAP’s bottom line – they serve more as a gesture than true compensation. Plus, if you don’t actively file a claim, you won’t even get the credit. Bottom line: The default service credits are unlikely to cover your losses or motivate SAP to avoid outages.
When it comes to support responsiveness, SAP’s out-of-the-box commitments are limited. Their SLA documents focus on system availability, while support SLAs (i.e., the time it takes for support to respond and resolve issues) are often undefined or buried in support policy documents.
Typically, with standard cloud support, a Priority-1 (“very high”) incident – such as a production outage – will receive an initial response within a couple of hours. SAP will have engineers start looking at it, but there’s usually no guaranteed time to actually fix the issue, just a “commercially reasonable effort.”
Less urgent issues (P2, P3) may have longer response targets (e.g., the next business day for P3). If your contract is for standard support, 24/7 help may only be available for P1 cases.
In short, the default SAP support SLA says “we’ll respond quickly to critical issues” – but you’re not getting firm resolution deadlines or broad 24×7 coverage unless you’ve paid for a premium support plan. This is a gap you’ll want to address in negotiations.
To put SAP’s standard SLA in context, let’s compare it with what leading cloud providers offer:
| SLA Aspect | SAP Cloud (Standard) | Industry-Leading Cloud Provider |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime Guarantee | ~99.5% monthly (approx 3-4 hours downtime allowed) | 99.9% or higher (approx 44 min or less downtime) |
| Service Credit for Breach | ~2% of monthly fee per 1% uptime drop (capped at a small % of fee) | Tiered credits, e.g. 10% credit if uptime <99.9%, up to 25% or more for major outages |
| Critical Issue Support | Initial response in 1-4 hours (P1 ticket); no firm resolution time guarantee | Initial response within 15 min to 1 hour for critical issues (with premium support); aggressive escalation for quick resolution |
Table: SAP’s default cloud SLA vs. a typical top-tier cloud provider SLA. As shown, SAP’s baseline commitments (left column) tend to be less aggressive than those of industry leaders (right column).
The uptime percentage is lower, the service credits are smaller, and the guaranteed support response isn’t as fast. This doesn’t mean SAP won’t perform well – but it does mean the contract doesn’t strongly hold them to high standards unless you negotiate it.
Checklist: Default SLA Review – Before negotiating, do a quick audit of the SLA in SAP’s draft contract:
- ☑ Uptime % clearly stated: Is the guaranteed uptime (e.g., 99.5%) explicitly listed for your production systems? Double-check it’s in the contract draft.
- ☑ Support response covered: Does the agreement include any support SLA (e.g., response times for P1/P2 incidents)? If not, flag this as a gap that needs to be filled.
- ☑ Remedies defined: Are the consequences of SAP missing the SLA clear (credits, etc.) and not just vague promises? Ensure that any service credit scheme is clearly described and not left to “SAP policy” only.
Maximize your flexibility. Usage Flexibility in SAP Contracts: Caps, True-Up Clauses, and Buffers.
2. Negotiating Higher Uptime and Service Levels
If your business operates 24/7 or experiences peak seasons where downtime is detrimental, a 99.5% uptime guarantee may be insufficient. At 99.5%, you’re accepting up to ~3.6 hours of downtime per month, which could result in a major outage during a critical shift or sales day.
Over a year, that’s roughly 43 hours of potential downtime allowed. For truly mission-critical systems, consider pushing for a higher uptime SLA, such as 99.9% or even 99.99%. Each “9” significantly reduces allowable downtime (99.9% is ~44 minutes/month; 99.99% is ~4.4 minutes/month).
In industries such as retail, banking, or manufacturing, those extra hours of uptime can be the difference between business as usual and a complete work stoppage.
Negotiating a higher uptime commitment with SAP will require a strong case.
Be prepared to explain why you need it: for example, “Our retail website loses $50,000 in sales every hour it’s down, so we need better than 99.5%.” SAP may offer an enhanced SLA tier (sometimes at an additional cost) or require specific high-availability architectures to support a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
One approach is to request geo-redundancy or multiple data center failovers for your system. By having your SAP environment mirrored in another data center or region, failover is possible if the primary site has issues – this can justify a 99.9%+ SLA.
Essentially, you’re asking SAP to architect the solution for higher availability. Ensure you get specifics: e.g., “Will my production instance be replicated across two availability zones for redundancy?”
If they can’t technically deliver higher uptime, an SLA number on paper won’t mean much. So, tie the uptime requirement to concrete measures, such as redundancy, clustering, or disaster recovery provisions.
Negotiating for “more 9s” often comes with trade-offs. SAP may increase your subscription fees for a higher service level, or they may push back if it’s not a standard offering.
This is where you weigh the cost of downtime versus the cost of a premium SLA. It might be worth paying, say, 10% more to reduce the chance of a costly outage.
However, if SAP absolutely won’t budge on the uptime percentage, consider alternative requests: perhaps keep 99.5% but negotiate a larger penalty if it’s breached (to strongly motivate them).
Also, ensure you discuss how maintenance downtime is handled – if you get 99.9% uptime but SAP then schedules long maintenance windows, it defeats the purpose. You may need to negotiate limits or notice periods for maintenance events as part of achieving real high availability.
Pros of negotiating a higher uptime SLA:
- Greater protection: Tighter uptime guarantees mean less tolerance for outages, providing you with greater confidence in reliability.
- Vendor accountability: A higher SLA sets a performance bar that keeps SAP more accountable and responsive, thereby reducing the likelihood of penalties.
Potential risks or downsides:
- Higher costs: SAP may charge a premium or require a higher service tier for 99.9% uptime. You’ll need to justify the ROI of that cost.
- Limited flexibility: If SAP doesn’t usually offer a higher SLA for your service, pushing for it could hit a wall. In some cases, they might only agree to the higher SLA with conditions (like reduced ability to customize, or stricter rules on your usage to ensure stability).
Ultimately, determine the level of risk that is acceptable for your business. You might aim for 99.9% but settle for 99.7% with other concessions if SAP won’t do 99.9%. Enter negotiations with a target and a fallback position. For instance, “Our target is 99.9%, but if not achievable, we want at least 99.7% plus enhanced credits for any miss.”
Checklist: Uptime Level Negotiation
- ☑ Target SLA defined: Decide the uptime percentage you need (e.g., 99.9%) based on business impact, and put that request on the table.
- ☑ Fallback position ready: Determine your minimum acceptable SLA (and/or other remedies) if the vendor pushes back. For example, “We can live with 99.7% if you also add the XYZ penalty for outages.”
Protect your IP, Intellectual Property and Licensing Rights in SAP Contracts (What’s Yours vs Theirs).
3. Service Credits and Financial Remedies
Let’s face it: downtime hurts you far more than it hurts SAP – unless you make the financial remedies meaningful. As noted, the default service credits in SAP’s SLA are token amounts.
Vendors often design credits to be just annoying enough that they prefer to avoid paying them, but not so high that they truly compensate customers. Your goal in negotiation is to raise the stakes. If SAP fails to meet the SLA, the penalty should be substantial enough to get management’s attention and feel like a real consequence.
Start by scrutinizing the standard credit structure. If it says “2% credit for each 1% below uptime,” calculate a few scenarios.
For example, if uptime in a month drops to 98% (which is quite a bad month), that’s 1.5% below a 99.5% SLA – roughly a 3% credit per the standard formula. On a $100,000 monthly fee, that’s $3,000 back to you. Meanwhile, your business might have lost ten times that in productivity or sales.
Clearly, that default math is not a sufficient incentive. In negotiation, propose a tiered service credit scheme: the further below the SLA, the larger the credit percentage.
You can also ask to remove or raise any caps on total credits. (SAP often caps credits at 100% of the monthly fee for a single month – but if they have multiple bad months, you want to claim credits each time, not just once.) The idea is to make the credit proportional to the pain caused.
For example, you might negotiate something like this: if uptime falls just slightly (say 0.5% below target), you get a modest credit (5%). If it falls more (1-2% below target), the credit grows (10-15%). And if there’s a catastrophic outage (e.g., <95% uptime in a month), you get a very large credit or even a free month of service. This sliding scale means SAP has a lot more at stake when preventing outages.
Tiered credits also acknowledge that a minor blip is different from a major meltdown – and the remedies should scale accordingly.
Another powerful remedy to negotiate is the right to terminate or escape the contract for chronic SLA failures. Credits alone may not suffice if SAP consistently underperforms.
You don’t want to be stuck in a multi-year deal with poor service, only getting small discounts while your business suffers.
Try to include a clause such as: “If SLA targets are missed for X consecutive months or Y times in 12 months, Customer may terminate the contract for cause without penalties.” The mere existence of a termination trigger often motivates the vendor to resolve underlying issues before it gets to that point. It gives you leverage to ensure they take persistent problems seriously.
Below is an example of a tiered credit structure versus SAP’s standard, for illustration:
| Monthly Uptime Achieved | SAP Standard Credit | Negotiated Tiered Credit (Example) |
|---|---|---|
| 99.5% or above (meet SLA) | No credit (SLA met) | No credit (SLA met) |
| 99.0% (≈7 hours downtime) | ~1% of monthly fee credit | 5% of monthly fee credit |
| 98.0% (≈14 hours downtime) | ~3% of monthly fee credit | 10% of monthly fee credit |
| 95.0% (≈36 hours downtime) | ~10% of monthly fee credit | 25% of monthly fee credit + option to terminate if repeated |
Table: Default SAP credits vs. a stronger negotiated tier. In this example, under a negotiated SLA, a particularly poor month (with 95% uptime) would result in a 25% fee credit for SAP and potentially trigger a contractual escape for you if it occurs repeatedly.
Under the default, SAP might only owe ~10% and face no further consequence, which they could view as just a cost of doing business. The tiered approach clearly provides a sharper incentive for SAP to avoid ever getting into that lower performance range.
When negotiating these terms, expect pushback. Vendors will claim they “never miss SLAs” or that such failures are rare – but if it’s truly rare, they shouldn’t fear a stronger penalty, right? Stick to your ask for meaningful credits.
Also, ensure the process for claiming credits is straightforward (automatic credits are preferable, rather than requiring you to file a claim and prove downtime). Ideally, the SLA reporting should confirm whether a breach occurred (see the next sections on reporting).
Checklist: Financial Remedies
- ☑ Credit percentages are meaningful: Ensure the SLA’s service credits aren’t just symbolic. Negotiate a higher credit % for downtime so that SAP has a real incentive to avoid breaches.
- ☑ Termination trigger included: Include a contract clause allowing exit or major remedy if SLA breaches happen multiple times. This provides a last-resort option if service quality remains poor.
- ☑ No token caps for chronic issues: Remove or extend any low caps on credits, especially for repeated failures. One bad month shouldn’t immunize the vendor from penalties the next month if problems persist.
4. Support SLAs: Beyond Uptime
Uptime guarantees alone don’t cover all the ways things can go wrong. Even if the system is technically “up,” you may still be experiencing severe performance issues, integration failures, or bugs that disrupt business processes.
In those moments, what matters is how fast the provider’s support team responds and resolves the issue.
This is why negotiating support SLAs is just as critical as uptime SLAs. SAP’s standard contracts often shy away from committing to resolution times – but you can and should ask for specific support performance terms in your agreement.
First, clarify the support coverage you’re getting. If you’re subscribing to an SAP cloud service via RISE or as SaaS, a certain level of support (such as SAP Enterprise Support, cloud edition) is typically bundled.
Ensure you know if it’s available 24/7 or only during business hours. For any mission-critical system, insist on 24×7 support availability for P1 incidents at a minimum.
You don’t want to discover at 3 AM that nobody is home to take your call. If the standard support isn’t 24×7, negotiate an upgrade or an exception in your contract for critical issues.
Next, define response times for different severity levels in writing. For example, “SAP will acknowledge and begin working on P1 (Critical) incidents within 1 hour, P2 (High) within 4 hours, P3 within one business day,” etc.
SAP may already have internal targets like these, but it is essential to include them in the contract or SLA exhibit to make them enforceable. Equally important, discuss resolution targets or at least time-bound escalation.
Vendors often hesitate to guarantee a resolution (since some problems are complex). Still, you can at least state: “if a P1 isn’t resolved within 4 hours, it gets escalated to SAP’s senior engineers or management,” or “SAP provides a workaround or action plan within X hours.”
In fact, SAP’s support policy often mentions an action plan within 4 hours for P1 – ensure that isn’t just a guideline but a commitment you can reference.
The goal is to avoid open-ended “we’ll get to it” situations. You want to know that if your core system is down, there’s a defined process and urgency to fix it fast, not just a quick email saying “we’re looking into it” and then silence.
If you are paying for a premium support tier (such as SAP MaxAttention, SAP Preferred Success, or a dedicated support lead), bake those promises into the SLA.
For instance, Preferred Success might advertise faster response or a designated contact – don’t leave those as marketing fluff.
Explicitly list any enhanced support features in the contract: e.g,. “Named support engineer assigned for our account,” “quarterly support review meetings,” or “Priority queuing for incidents.” Everything should be written, not implied. This holds SAP accountable to deliver the premium service you paid for.
Here are some support terms to negotiate or verify:
- 24/7 critical support: Ensure that for P1 emergencies, support is available around the clock (including weekends and holidays). Downtime doesn’t keep to a 9-5 schedule, and neither should support.
- Guaranteed response times: For each priority level, define the response time that SAP will adhere to. For example, “Priority 1: response within 1 hour; Priority 2: within 4 hours; Priority 3: within 1 business day.” If possible, shorten P1 to even 30 minutes – some enterprises push for this and establish a dedicated hotline.
- Named escalation contacts: Insist on an escalation path. You should have the name and phone number of someone (like an SAP support manager or your technical account manager) to call if an issue is not getting resolved fast enough. Knowing exactly who to wake up when things are on fire can save precious time.
- Resolution/Workaround targets: While SAP might not promise “we’ll solve it in X hours,” you can request that they commit to providing a workaround or a detailed action plan within a short timeframe (e.g., 4 hours for P1). This ensures they don’t just acknowledge the ticket and leave you guessing.
- Regular communication: For a critical outage, SAP should update you frequently (hourly updates for P1 is a good practice). Ensure the SLA specifies the ongoing communication cadence during major incidents.
Nailing down these support expectations means you won’t be left in the dark during an incident. It turns the ambiguous “we’ll do our best” into a contractually backed promise of responsiveness.
Checklist: Support SLA Essentials
- ☑ Documented support terms: All support response times and coverage obligations are written into the contract (not just in an online policy). Don’t rely on assumptions.
- ☑ Escalation defined: You have names/roles for escalation and a commitment that severe issues will be worked on continuously until resolved.
- ☑ 24×7 confirmed: For critical scenarios, 24×7 support availability is guaranteed, so you’re never without help in an emergency.
5. Monitoring, Reporting, and Transparency
An SLA is only as good as your ability to verify and enforce it.
That’s why monitoring and reporting requirements should be part of your negotiation. You need transparency into SAP’s performance – otherwise, you’re essentially trusting the vendor to grade their own homework. It’s absolutely reasonable to ask for regular reports and visibility tools so you can track uptime and support performance.
Require SAP to provide monthly or quarterly SLA reports for your services. These reports should display the actual uptime achieved, any downtime incidents (including dates and durations), and whether SLA targets were met. Ideally, it would also note any support ticket metrics if you negotiated support responsiveness terms (e.g., “P1 incidents this quarter: average response 45 minutes, resolved in 3 hours” etc.).
Having this in writing on a regular cadence keeps everyone honest. It also provides the evidence you’ll need to claim credits if there was an SLA breach. Don’t let the contract be silent on reporting – otherwise, you’ll be chasing account managers for data or, worse, not knowing there was a breach at all.
Even better is to get real-time or self-serve transparency. Ask if SAP has a customer dashboard or “trust center” for your cloud service. Many cloud providers offer status pages or portals that provide visibility into uptime statistics, ongoing incidents, and historical availability.
If such a tool exists (for example, SAP has status dashboards for some SaaS like Ariba or SuccessFactors), negotiate access and inclusion of that in your SLA terms. You might say, “SAP will provide the Customer with access to an online service availability dashboard and timely outage notifications.” If no portal exists, at least get an agreement that they will notify you promptly (via email/text) when a serious incident is occurring. You shouldn’t learn about an outage only when end-users scream – you should get an alert from SAP that helps you initiate your contingency plans immediately.
Another aspect is the ability to independently audit or verify SLA performance.
This can be a bit sensitive, but if your operations are highly critical, consider negotiating audit rights. For example, “Customer or an appointed third-party may audit the availability records or monitoring logs in case of dispute over SLA compliance.”
Even if you never use this right, just having it ensures SAP knows you could double-check their numbers. It discourages any temptation to gloss over an incident.
Transparency provisions are primarily concerned with trust and verification. They benefit both parties: you get confidence that you’re receiving what was promised, and SAP gets to demonstrate its reliability (or address issues if it’s falling short).
Pros of strong monitoring & reporting:
- Accountability: You have data to hold SAP accountable. Regular reports highlight whether they met or missed targets, so there’s no ambiguity.
- Proactive management: Real-time visibility enables you to identify issues early and respond promptly, rather than being in the dark. It also enables more productive discussions with SAP using objective metrics, rather than guesswork.
Risks if transparency is lacking:
- “Blind faith” in vendor: Without reports or dashboards, you might miss SLA violations. SAP could be “grading itself” with no external check – smaller incidents might slip under the radar or be downplayed.
- Delayed reactions: If you’re not alerted promptly to downtime, your team can’t react or communicate effectively with stakeholders, which compounds the damage.
In summary, don’t overlook the governance part of the SLA. Negotiating great uptime and support promises is step one; step two is ensuring you can monitor those promises. Insist on the right to know exactly how SAP is performing against the SLA at regular intervals.
Checklist: Transparency Requirements
- ☑ Regular SLA reports: Your contract stipulates that SAP will deliver uptime/service performance reports (e.g., monthly or quarterly), so you have written records.
- ☑ Visibility & audit rights: You have access to a status dashboard and periodic metrics, as well as the right to verify SLA data as needed. In short, SAP’s performance data is an open book to you.
6. Remedies for Chronic Failures
What if, despite all the provisions and good intentions, SAP repeatedly fails to meet the SLA? One outage can be forgiven, especially if handled well; however, repeated failures are a red flag.
They indicate systemic issues and erode your trust. This is why your SLA negotiation should include specific remedies for chronic underperformance, in addition to the standard credits.
We touched on the ultimate remedy earlier: the ability to terminate the contract for cause if SLA breaches continue to occur. In this section, let’s develop a graduated response plan for addressing chronic SLA failures.
The idea is to establish escalation steps that compel SAP to address the root cause and compensate you appropriately if the problems persist.
First, define what counts as a “chronic SLA failure.” For example, you might define it as three or more SLA breaches within a rolling 12-month period, or two consecutive months of uptime below the guarantee. Essentially, multiple strikes, not just one-off incidents.
You can also set a severity qualifier, such as requiring a special review for any single outage exceeding a certain duration (e.g., more than 8 hours of downtime in one instance). Hammer out these criteria in the contract: it should be very clear how many breaches or how severe an issue qualifies as chronic non-performance.
Once the criteria are met, outline escalation remedies. A typical approach:
- After the first couple of breaches, require an executive-level review. For instance, SAP must arrange a meeting between your executives and their senior management to discuss the failures and present a remediation plan. This ensures the issue gets attention at the highest level and isn’t just lost in support tickets. When SAP’s higher-ups are involved, there’s more pressure internally to allocate resources and fix things fast.
- If issues persist, consider offering complimentary services or upgrades as a gesture of goodwill. For example, if SAP missed SLA three times in a year, maybe they will provide you with free additional support services (like upgrading you to premium support for a period, at no cost), or a free month of service credit beyond the usual credits. The logic here is that chronic failures should yield more than the standard compensation – you deserve extra support to regain stability. It’s also an incentive for SAP: they don’t want to have to give stuff away for free repeatedly, so they’ll work to avoid triggering that clause.
- Finally, the termination-for-cause option should be crystal clear for extreme cases. E.g., “If SLA is missed in three consecutive months, or in any five months out of twelve, Customer may terminate the agreement without penalty.” This is the escape hatch. It might never be used, but it’s your safety net if SAP just can’t get its act together. Often, just having this clause will make SAP very mindful to address recurring problems promptly (they don’t want to lose the contract).
Let’s illustrate possible criteria for chronic breach you might use:
- 3+ SLA misses in a rolling 12-month period: If in any year there were three or more months where SAP didn’t meet the uptime or support SLA, that’s chronic failure.
- Two consecutive months below SLA target: If they fail back-to-back, it’s a serious warning sign of unresolved issues.
- (Optional) Major outage threshold: e.g., any single downtime event exceeding X hours may be counted as multiple strikes or trigger a special review. (This can be included if relevant to your risk.)
Whatever criteria you choose, the key is to set a threshold that, if reached, clearly indicates the service isn’t meeting your needs consistently.
Now, for each of those scenarios, spell out the remedies. Perhaps after two misses, executive review; after three misses, a free support upgrade for six months; after four, a termination option.
Tailor it to what you think will both protect your interests and spur the vendor to improve. Keep the tone cooperative – the goal is to get SAP to fix problems, not just punish them, but make sure the contract gives you leverage if things go south.
Checklist: Chronic Failure Provisions
- ☑ Chronic criteria defined: The contract defines what “repeated SLA failure” means in concrete numbers (e.g., X breaches in Y time). No ambiguity here.
- ☑ Escalation and remedies documented: There are clear steps SAP must take if those criteria are met – from executive escalation to service credits to allowing contract termination. You have a game plan on paper for worst-case scenarios.
End-to-End SLA Negotiation Checklist
Bringing it all together, here’s a final checklist to ensure you’ve covered all bases in your SAP cloud SLA negotiation.
Before you sign on the dotted line, verify that your agreement includes these hard-won protections:
- ☑ Uptime commitment upgraded: The SLA’s uptime percentage has been benchmarked against your needs (and industry standards) and improved if necessary. You’re not settling for a bare-minimum uptime if your business requires more.
- ☑ Meaningful, tiered service credits: Financial remedies are robust – scaled to outage impact, not just token credits. The SLA has teeth to motivate performance, and caps on credits won’t let SAP off the hook easily.
- ☑ Chronic failure exit clause: You have a termination/right-to-exit clause (or similar strong remedy) tied to chronic SLA failures. If SAP repeatedly falls short, you have the right to walk away or invoke heavy penalties, providing the ultimate safety net.
- ☑ Documented support SLAs: The contract clearly spells out support response times (and ideally resolution processes) for P1/P2 issues. You know exactly how fast help will come and how issues will be escalated.
- ☑ Reporting & transparency secured: You will receive regular SLA performance reports and/or have access to monitoring data. There’s no blind trust – you have visibility into SAP’s compliance with the SLA, plus audit rights if needed.
By addressing each of the items above, you transform a standard SAP cloud contract into a truly enterprise-grade agreement.
Negotiating these terms can be a challenge, SAP representatives might say, “This isn’t how we usually do it,” – but stay firm. As a customer investing in a critical cloud service, you have every right to expect reliability, accountability, and remedies if things go wrong.
In conclusion, an SLA is your insurance policy for cloud success. Don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions and get commitments in writing.
Downtime and service issues will happen at some point – but with a well-negotiated SLA, you’ll have the guarantees, credits, and escape hatches to protect your business when they do.
Here’s to a resilient, worry-free SAP cloud experience now that you’ve got the right safeguards in place!
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