1. General

This corporate Operational Level Agreement (OLA) is valid for all GÉANT IT services and supporting service components, if no other agreements are in place. The Corporate Level OLA may be extended or replaced by a more specific agreement.

Each Service Provider has either to agree on this agreement or define a service specific OLA before providing a service.

2. Service delivery & operating times

IT services are in general delivered during 24 hours per day, 7 days per week (i.e. 365 days or 8,760 hours), to seamlessly support business operations. Planned and announced interruptions may reduce the effective operating time of a service.

3. Overall availability target

For each service provided, the minimum annual availability target is 99%, independent from the criticality of the service. This means that in one year, the service must not be unavailable for more than 87 hours, if the effective operating time is 8,760 hours. Planned and agreed interruptions (e.g., for maintenance) are not considered as unavailability, since they are not part of the effective operating time.

4. Planned interruptions, incidents & support

Service Support Hours are from Monday to Friday, 09:00 - 17:00 CE(S)T (business day) excluding public holidays at the location of the Service Provider. Outside of Support Hours, support may be provided on a best effort basis.
Any planned interruption will be announced in advance via agreed communication channels with a notice period of at least 7 business days.
An incident can be an unplanned interruption to or reduction in the quality of the service component(s) related configuration items OR a failure of a configuration item that has not yet impacted a service. Any request within normal service functionality, call for information or similar is called Service Request (SR).
Incidents will be handled according to an appropriate priority based on the impact and urgency of the incident. Response times are measured during Support Hours only, which define the timeframe of one business day. SRs will be handled similar to incidents with a low priority. In this context, the following priority guidelines apply:

5. Information security & data protection

The following rules for information security and data protection apply. In accordance to local law, all secrecy and privacy rules defined remain valid after termination of this agreement.

The Service Provider must agree and stick to the GÉANT Data Protection Code of Conduct [1].
Yearly security assessments of used software are performed and reported to the Customer. Critical security vulnerabilities must be patched within 3 months.

If required, the Service Provider and Customer have to agree a Data Processing Agreement.

6. OLA Violations

Violations of this OLA are documented in the service report and discussed during the regular meeting. In case of multiple occurrences or major violations of this OLA, the Service Provider must identify the root cause and provide an appropriate solution design to prevent future violations.

If the Service Provider is not able to provide a suitable solution, the customer is allowed to terminate this OLA without notice (section 7).

7. Termination of Service

Both the Customer as well as the Service Provider, retain the right to terminate the collaboration and therefore this agreement with a notice period of 3 months to the end of the month.
Once this agreement terminates, the entire business connection between the Service Provider and the Customer will end.

The Service Provider commits to perform the following activities:

• Collaborate to the transition to another operational partner, including the transfer of all data, provision of operational knowledge and documentation in English
• Shutdown the service at an agreed point in time
• Deletion of all resources and information related to the service provision once the service termination is completed (in accordance with applying laws)

10. Glossary of Terms

For the purpose of this agreement, the following specific terms and definitions apply [2]:

• Customer
  The customer of the Service is the GÉANT Association.
  This term does not apply to end users using the service.
• Service Provider
  An (internal) organisation or part of it (commercial or non-commercial) that has a contractual relationship with GÉANT on the provision of the Service. This term does not refer to technical service providers in the context of eduGAIN, SAML or OIDC.

11. References

[1] GÉANT Data Protection Code of Conduct 2.0
https://wiki.refeds.org/download/attachments/1606455/GEANT_CoCo_explanatory_memorandum_07012018_clean.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1547449368876&api=v2 

[2] FitSM-0: Overview and vocabulary
https://fitsm.itemo.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/05/FitSM-0_Overview_and_vocabulary.pdf

12. Document control