A technology vendor can meet its SLA while your business still fails its customers.
The vendor may restore service within the contract terms, but payments can still be delayed, customers can lose access, employees can be forced into manual workarounds, and compliance or reputational exposure can grow.
“57% of respondents said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000.” – Uptime Institute, Annual Outage Analysis 2026
Yet the contractual remedy may amount to little more than a service credit. The vendor met its obligation; your business absorbed the consequences. That’s why an SLA is not an operating recovery plan.
Before signing or renewing a critical platform, leadership should ask:
• What stops when the service stops and how long can each process tolerate it?
• Has the workaround been tested under real operating volume?
• Which other providers does the vendor depend on?
• Who owns the response across operations, IT, risk, and compliance?
• How will transactions and data be verified after recovery?
An SLA measures vendor performance. Operational resilience measures whether your organization can continue serving its customers.
Before approving a platform for what it can do, test what happens when it cannot.
At Cyber8 Technology, I help leaders evaluate both sides of that decision.
David Gillies
Principal, Cyber8 Technology
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