Case Study la Mobilière: Service Level Agreement (SLA)

When outsourcing the hosting of www.mobiliar.ch and other web projects as part of its brand relaunch, la Mobilière was looking for a high availability solution that included monitoring the platform and application

Customer Expectations

The updating of the la Mobilière brand and the overhaul of the full online product range signalled a new direction for the company. To make sure that customers would also benefit from the new approach, la Mobilière needed a solution with guaranteed high availability for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Challenges of la Mobilière

Hosting the website - previously managed by the internal IT department at le Mobilière - was to be outsourced with the 2015 relaunch. In addition, a complete new information structure was to be developed, a new CMS introduced, previous stand-alone microsites integrated into the main website, and three separate domains (one per language) were to be split out from a single domain. In addition to the above innovations, it was also important for la Mobilière to find a reliable and highly available solution that not only guaranteed uninterrupted operations, but also one where steps could be taken immediately in exceptional cases.

Requirements for the Managed Cloud Provider:

• continuous monitoring of the platform itself and the applications running on it
• guaranteed availability of services 24/7
• effective cooperation with Liip AG for the web development

Nine's Solution

The requirements defined by la Mobilière could be fully met by Nine, by adding a service level agreement as an additional option to the managed setup.

• Platform monitoring forms a part of the server management, which is normally included in all managed setups. The service level agreement supplements this with additional application
  
  
• monitoring, with a string check being used to perform regular validation of defined parameters. This ensures that Nine is always informed about any disruption to the la Mobilière platform, and can react immediately - regardless of whether it was the platform or the application that caused the fault.
  
  
• In order to guarantee the availability of la Mobilière's online presence, further agreements were included under the service level agreement. These included, for example, a guaranteed response time, preferential treatment in case of a serious incident, and also a guaranteed availability level of 99.9%. Cooperating with the Liip agency as part of the requirements was no problem for Nine. The two companies have successfully completed projects together in the past, and were able draw on these for the la Mobilière project.