Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) thinks you shouldn’t have to pay for maintenance time for its online applications and it’s putting its Service Level Agreement where its mouth is.
Looking to demonstrate to its enterprise customers that Google Apps is suited for business use that demands uptime reliability, the search engine giant said it has eliminated scheduled maintenance from the SLA.
The news is noteworthy because while SLA agreements guarantee a certain percentage of uptime (usually more than 99 percent), the contracts typically don’t include scheduled maintenance. Customers get a credit for any other downtime that fails to meet the SLA.
“Were removing the SLA clause that allows for scheduled downtime. Going forward, all downtime will be counted and applied towards the customer’s SLA,” Matthew Glotzbach, Google’s enterprise product management director, said in a blog post. “We are the first major cloud provider to eliminate maintenance windows from their service level agreement.”