Greetings!
Al Potter schrieb:
> We're debating what is reasonable for a fortune 500 customer to demand from a
> high-end firewall vendor in terms of support, and have the following questions:
What type of "firewall vendor" do you talk about: a software company that only
works 8h/day with 5days/week or a service company whose engineers sit in an
operations center and watch your FW 24/7/365?
> 1. What is the reasonable minimum for response time on a support contract?
If you see the firewall as whole system you could have a look at the hardware side
(even if only for comparison). E.g. if you choose a mid-class Sun support contract:
reply within 2 or 4 hours, engineer (with spare parts) on-site within 24h latest.
For a 24/7/365 operations centre I'd want notification within 30minutes ("Sir, we
have a problem - and we are working on it right now").
> 2. What are normal parameters for required escalation to a higher level of
> support?
Usually there are no real "escalations" - at least on a technical level. All things
that the 1st level suport ("User Help Desk" that deals with RTFM cases) cannot
solve are automatically forwarded to the experts. This transfer should not take
longer than ~30 minutes (for 24/7/365 expert coverage centres). Of course there are
organizational escalations ("I want to talk to your superior immediately!") - but
that won't help you on a technical problem.
> 3. Is it reasonable to have an absolute contractual deadline for final issue
> resolution, and if so, what is a reasonable amount of time for this?
A "deadline" is only possible if you have a full replacement standing nearby. The
best I have heard of is 6 hours for delivery of a complete replacement computing
centre - the company comes rolling in with some dozen truck-mounted containers
converted into mobile computing centres. But you will have to mortage your soul (or
at least a HUGE ammount of cash) for this service.
Quite often you will run into the problem to hang between two services: the FW
company says the uplink line is broken - your link provider says the line is ok but
FW is broken - with you hanging in between... :-(
Bye
Volker
--
Volker Tanger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Wrangelstr. 100, 10997 Berlin, Germany
DiSCON GmbH - Internet Solutions
http://www.discon.de/
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