Writing as someone who has frequently had to negotiate on behalf of enterprises buying a resold service, I can tell you that I regard SLAs as a mechanism for a

Writing as someone who has frequently had to negotiate on behalf of enterprises buying a resold service, I can tell you that I regard SLAs as a mechanism for a vendor to provide lousy service whilst transferring almost all the financial risk and compliance burden to the customer. I have never yet seen a SLA with penalties worth signing up for. Nor do I ever expect to. I would rather have reporting transparency on things like uptime & service desk responses, than have penalties on those things i.e. creating incentives for suppliers (especially intermediaries) to report them deceptively.