Who’s SLA Is It Anyway?

Untangling Responsibility, Liability, and the Chain of Service Dependencies

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are supposed to make things clear, a contractual promise of performance and reliability. But in today’s interconnected world, they often do the opposite.

When a customer’s service goes down and fingers start pointing, the question isn’t what failed, it’s who owns the failure?

If your company promises 99.9% uptime but relies on multiple vendors, cloud providers, or network carriers to deliver that service… whose SLA is it, really?

The Chain Reaction Nobody Talks About...

In managed services, telco, and cloud environments, SLAs rarely live in isolation. Your customer’s SLA sits on top of your SLA with another vendor, which in turn depends on yet another provider upstream.

It’s a domino effect: Customer SLA → Your Company → Vendor → Cloud Provider

The problem? Customers only see one face... yours. When the SLA is breached, it doesn’t matter if the outage was caused by a downstream carrier, a data center outage, or a SaaS vendor update gone wrong. From the customer’s perspective, you are accountable.

And legally, they’re right. The SLA they signed is with you, not your vendor.

Responsibility vs. Liability...

In the world of SLAs, there’s an important distinction:

• Responsibility is operational... who has to fix it.

• Liability is contractual... who has to pay for it.

Even if a vendor’s system failed, your company remains responsible for communicating with the customer, managing the impact, and reporting on the breach.

You can later seek recourse with the vendor under your underpinning contract (sometimes called a back-to-back SLA), but that process takes time, and it doesn’t undo the customer impact or reputational damage.

When “99.9% Uptime” Becomes a Game of Math...

Consider this... If your customer SLA promises 99.9% uptime but your cloud provider only guarantees 99.5%, your effective uptime can never exceed 99.5%. It’s like stacking tolerances, and every dependency lowers the overall reliability ceiling.

That’s why well-structured SLAs often include:

• Third-party dependency disclaimers

• Force majeure exceptions

• Defined escalation and remediation paths

Without those protections, you may find yourself covering losses for something you couldn’t possibly control.

Lessons Learned from the Field...

Having directed and managed IT, Dev, and SOC operations, I’ve seen how quickly SLA confusion can snowball. One of the biggest challenges isn’t fixing the outage, it’s managing expectations. When the incident involves an upstream partner, you’re suddenly the middleman between your customer and another company’s SLA clock.

I Believe The best organizations:

• Build back-to-back SLAs where vendor commitments meet or exceed what they promise customers.

• Track vendor uptime independently, so they can defend their own SLA data.

• Keep communication transparent, even when the issue isn’t their fault.

Because the truth is, blame can be outsourced, but accountability cannot.

What I Found to be Best Practices to Stay Out of the Gray Zone...

1. Mirror SLAs: Align vendor SLAs with customer SLAs where possible to avoid exposure gaps.

2. Define Dependencies: Clearly state in your SLA which services are dependent on third parties.

3. Communicate Early: During outages, transparency builds trust faster than excuses.

4. Keep Legal and Technical Teams in Sync: Contract wording should match the operational reality.

5. Document the Chain: Maintain an internal matrix of vendors and their SLA metrics to understand your weakest link.

At the end of the day, every SLA is a promise... not just of uptime, but of accountability. When things go wrong, customers don’t care who was at fault upstream; they care who’s answering the phone.

So the next time someone asks, “Whose SLA is it anyway?” The honest answer might just be: It’s yours, until proven otherwise.