When you are looking for a cloud solution, one of the most important things you need to understand is that of the service-level agreement. The service-level agreement, or SLA, is the promise that any vendor makes to your business. Any good provider of cloud services will have a transparent SLA that can not only make promises, but back these promises with incentives and penalties. The following items should be covered and promised in writing.

1. System availability: Look for a vendor that can commit to 99% availability or higher.
2. Disaster recovery: If there’s a data center disaster, make sure that you’ll be back up in 24 hours, and that you’ll lose no more than 2 hours of data.
3. Data integrity and ownership: If you decide to leave your cloud vendor in the future, you should be able to get your data out of the vendor’s system—period.
4. Support response: As a general rule, your vendor should be transparent about what constitutes a high-priority, medium priority, and lower priority issue—and should be able to respond to high- priority requests within one to two hours.
5. Escalation procedures: If you have a support case that you feel needs to be escalated, you be provided with a clear escalation path and the contact information of at least three people to contact.
6. Maintenance communication: Your vendor should let you know when regular recurring maintenance activities take place, and should post a special notification if any maintenance activity is expected to take longer than normal.
7. Product communication: Your vendor should commit to providing regular updates on new product features and product release notes.

This information and much more is part of the 2015 Cloud Accounting and Financial Management Buyers Guide from Intacct. In the Buyer’s Guide, you will learn:

• Why most financial software systems hinder your ability to get good financial information.
• The six key questions you need to ask before considering a move to a cloud-based financial solution.
• Why the process for evaluating software is different for cloud solutions—and the seven things to make sure you’ve got in writing.

Click here to get the entire 2015 Buyers’ Guide. Altruas, as a proud provider of Intacct, the scalable cloud financial management software for growing businesses, is proud to share this and other resources surrounding your move to the cloud:

• Case Study: Intacct Streamlined Reporting for Potential Church
• The Importance of Enterprise-Ready Software
• Five Things to Look for in Cloud Accounting Providers

Learn more about this solution and other services provided by Altruas when you subscribe to our cloud e-newsletter. Contact us when you’re ready to make the cloud move.