Service Level Agreements (SLAs) - SaaS SLA (Archived)

Sitecore® SaaS Products

SaaS Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Updates to Terms: Sitecore may update this SLA from time to time by providing Customer’s technical contact with at least 30 days’ notice, provided that Sitecore does not materially degrade the services or service levels available to Customer under this SLA.

Monitoring

Sitecore will monitor the SaaS Product 24x7, 365 days per year.

Software Maintenance

Sitecore will perform software and platform updates as part of Customer’s Subscription (“Maintenance”).

Maintenance includes all regularly scheduled error corrections, software and platform updates, and improvements to features, where Sitecore may, at its discretion, upgrade versions, install error corrections and apply patches to the hosted systems. Sitecore shall use all reasonable endeavors to avoid downtime due to Maintenance.

In case Maintenance will require downtime, Sitecore will plan this outside of Business Hours and communicate this to Customer in advance and in any case no later than 48 hours before the Maintenance commences.

Business Days are calculated as any day other than a Saturday or Sunday.

Business Hours are calculated as follows:

• For Americas, 8am-6pm CST (2pm-12am UTC)
• For Europe, 8am-6pm CET (7am-5pm UTC)
• For Greater Asia, 6am-6pm MYT (10pm-10am UTC)

Emergency Maintenance

Should emergency Maintenance be required (e.g. in the case of a necessary security patch), Sitecore will make every effort to keep the inconvenience to a minimum, including by providing as much notice as is practicable under the circumstances, and to the extent practicable, minimizing downtime or degradation of services during Business Hours.

Breaking Changes

Sitecore shall provide at least 30 days’ advance notice prior to Sitecore making changes to integration interfaces between the SaaS Product and Customer’s systems. Such notice will also include the time window for when these changes will be applied to their environments, the new interface specifications, as well as contact details for a Sitecore technical contact to help answer questions about these changes. By providing such notice Sitecore aims to minimize any interference with the continued operation of any integration interfaces affected by such changes. Sitecore shall also use commercially reasonable endeavors to perform these changes outside of Business Hours.

Uptime

If Sitecore does not achieve and maintain the Service Levels (defined below) for the SaaS Product as described in this SLA, Customer will be entitled to a credit towards a portion of the applicable fees as set forth below. 

Service Level Definitions

“Accrual Period” means any of the 12-month periods that make up Customer’s subscription.*

“Applicable Monthly Period” means the month in an Accrual Period in which a Service Credit may be earned.

“Applicable Monthly Fees” means the pro-rated amount of the fees paid by Customer for the SaaS Product in the relevant Accrual Period in which the Service Credit was earned, which amount is then divided by twelve.*

“Downtime” is defined for each SaaS Product as set forth in Appendix 1. Downtime does not include unavailability of the SaaS Product due to the Exclusions described below or as otherwise set forth in Appendix 1.

“Maximum Available Minutes” is the total accumulated minutes for the SaaS Product during an Applicable Monthly Period.

“Monthly Uptime Commitment” means the provision of the SaaS Product with a Monthly Uptime Percentage of at least 99.90%.

“Monthly Uptime Percentage” is calculated using the following formula (for each production environment):

Maximum Available Minutes – Downtime	X 100
Maximum Available Minutes

“Service Credit” is the percentage of the Applicable Monthly Fees credited to Customer following Sitecore’s approval of the claim as set forth below:

Monthly Uptime Percentage	Service Credit
Above or equal to 99.90%	None
<99.90% but above or equal to 98%	10%
<98%	20%

“Service Level” means the availability metric(s) set forth in this SLA that Sitecore agrees to meet in the delivery of the SaaS Product.

* Where the subscription is for less than 12 months, then the Accrual Period will be equal to the subscription period, and the Applicable Monthly Fees will be calculated by dividing by the number of months in the applicable subscription period.

Service Credit

In the event Sitecore does not meet a Monthly Uptime Commitment, Customer has the right to claim a Service Credit. In order for Sitecore to consider a claim, Customer must submit the claim by emailing Sitecore at [email protected] and citing the applicable invoice number the Service Credit is claimed against. The Service Credit shall be deemed waived unless Sitecore receives the foregoing email request claiming a Service Credit within ten (10) days of the end of the Applicable Monthly Period.

Sitecore will evaluate all information reasonably available to it and make a good faith determination of whether any Service Credit is owed. Customer must be in compliance with the Agreement and current on all payments at the time the reported Service Credit occurred in order to be eligible for a Service Credit. If Sitecore determines that a Service Credit is owed to Customer, Sitecore will apply such Service Credit to any future payment of Fees occurring after the Accrual Period in which the Service Credit was earned.

Service Credits are Customer’s sole and exclusive remedy for any availability issues with the SaaS Product, and will not entitle Customer to any refund or other payment from Sitecore. Customer may not unilaterally offset its fees for any availability issues.

Exclusions to Uptime Guarantee:

1. Downtime affecting only non-production environments;
2. Downtime caused by planned Maintenance, to the extent that planned Maintenance occurs outside Business Hours, and is communicated at least 48 hours in advance;
3. Downtime caused by emergency Maintenance slots, as long as Downtime for emergency Maintenance does not exceed 4 hours per month;
4. Downtime caused by Customer’s negligence; and
5. Force Majeure, in which case Sitecore will make commercially reasonable efforts to limit any inconvenience for Customer, but will be temporarily relieved from providing Service Credits as long as Sitecore (a) notifies Customer within 2 hours of the occurrence of a Force Majeure event (or if impracticable under the circumstances, as soon as reasonably practicable), and (b) updates Customer every 24 hours during the course of the Force Majeure event of the anticipated duration of the outage (or if impracticable under the circumstances, as often as reasonably practicable).

Backup and Disaster Recovery

All SaaS Products are designed and configured for high availability and resiliency against local outages. Sitecore runs all critical components of each of the SaaS Products in at least 2 cloud provider datacenters in separate availability zones within the selected cloud provider region. In addition, as part of its backup procedures Sitecore replicates the backup of all Customer Data to at least 1 other region (the paired cloud datacenter region). Whenever possible the paired cloud datacenter region(s) are at least 300 miles apart, but this is not always possible given that, in order to satisfy data residency, tax and legal enforcement requirements, the paired cloud datacenter regions must be in the same geography.

Sitecore will implement and update on a periodic basis its disaster recovery policies, standards, and procedures, and will maintain strict compliance with its disaster recovery policies, standards, and procedures. Sitecore will report disasters (or potential disasters) to Customer Named Contacts promptly upon identification. Sitecore will schedule and test the components of its disaster recovery plans at least twice a year.

In case of a disaster, when one of the cloud datacenter regions is disrupted or inaccessible and deemed non-recoverable by the cloud service provider, Sitecore will use best efforts to achieve a Recovery Point Objective of 24 hours and a Recovery Time Objective of 3 working days recovery at the paired cloud datacenter region.

Sitecore shall use reasonable commercial endeavors to restore the lost or damaged Customer Data from the latest back-up of such Customer Data maintained by Sitecore.

SaaS Product Specific SLA Terms and Conditions

Additional terms and conditions applicable to specific SaaS Products are set forth in Appendix 1.

Appendix 1: SaaS Product Specific Definitions

1.1 Sitecore Content Hub

Premium Managed Services Offering

Premium Managed Services (Content Hub) includes the use and management of 2 Non-Production Environments. These Non-Production Environments are typically used for setting up development and QA environments and will be used in concert with Customer’s production Instance to create a workflow for code or configuration promotion and version upgrades. The given uptime SLA does not apply to Non-Production Environments.

For Premium Managed Services (Content Hub) customers, software upgrades will be performed on a schedule as agreed with the Customer. Customers will not be allowed to remain on a version of the software that is older than 6 months or skip more than one x.x version, whichever happens first. As an example, when version x.3 is made available, customers on version x.1 will be asked to plan an upgrade.

Definition of Downtime

“Downtime” is the total accumulated minutes during which the https://{customer-hostname}/api/status endpoint is unresponsive or returns anything else then 200 - OK. The endpoint checks the status for all internal services and connections to all used datastores.

1.2 Sitecore Experience Edge; Sitecore Experience Edge for Content Hub

Definition of Downtime

“Downtime” is the total accumulated minutes during which the https://edge.sitecorecloud.io/api/status endpoint is unresponsive or the returned status indicates downtime for the customer’s region. The endpoint checks the status for all internal services and connections to all used datastores.

Example for normal response payload for the https://edge.sitecorecloud.io/api/status endpoint:

{

"weu-01": "up",

"eus-01": "up",

"wus-01": "up",

"aue-01": "up",

"jpe-01": "up"

}

1.3 Sitecore Customer Data Platform

Definition of Downtime

“Downtime” is the total accumulated minutes during which the SaaS Product was unavailable.

Performance

The SaaS Product response time should be recorded as under 200ms for the 95th percentile of the calls to the ingestion API(s), where measurement takes place at the boundary of the SaaS Product and does not include the time taken to traverse the public internet.

1.4 Sitecore Personalize

Definition of Downtime

“Downtime” is the total accumulated minutes during which the SaaS Product was unavailable.

Performance

The SaaS Product response time should be recorded as under 200ms for the 95th percentile of the calls to the decisioning API(s) on a Typical Implementation, where:

• “Typical Implementation” means an implementation that does not include external API calls and/or high complex data ingestions from the Canvas;
• “Canvas” means the component in the SaaS Product where Customer configures its decisioning API; and
• measurement takes place at the boundary of the SaaS Product and does not include the time taken to traverse the public internet.

1.5 Sitecore OrderCloud

Definition of Downtime

“Downtime” is the total accumulated minutes during which the OrderCloud API is not available for use according to third party performance and monitoring services contracted by Sitecore for the SaaS Product at its sole discretion (the “Monitoring Service”). The Monitoring Service reports of availability is currently available upon request.

1.6 Sitecore Discover

Definition of Downtime

“Downtime” is the total accumulated minutes during which the Sitecore Discover API is not available for use according to third party performance and monitoring services contracted by Sitecore for the SaaS Product at its sole discretion (the “Monitoring Service”). The Monitoring Service reports of availability is currently available upon request.

Amendments to Definitions of “Monthly Uptime Commitment” and “Service Credit”

For purposes of Sitecore Discover only, the following definitions are amended and restated as follows:

“Monthly Uptime Commitment” means the provision of the SaaS Product with a Monthly Uptime Percentage of at least 99.95%.

“Service Credit” is the percentage of the Applicable Monthly Fees credited to Customer following Sitecore’s approval of the claim as set forth below:

Monthly Uptime Percentage	Service Credit
Above or equal to 99.95%	None
<99.95% but above or equal to 99%	10%
<99%	20%