This Annex forms part of the Cloud Master Services Agreement and describes the scope, responsibilities and limitations relating to the Service Level Agreement.

These targets are designed for typical small and medium-sized business workloads. They are not a substitute for formal business continuity or disaster recovery planning.

1. Availability targets

  1. Subject to the exclusions in this Annex, we aim to achieve:
    • Cloud Platform (core infrastructure): 99.9% availability per calendar month;
    • Remote Desktop / Virtual Desktop environments: 99.5% availability per calendar month; and
    • Website hosting platform: 99.5% availability per calendar month.
  2. Availability is measured against our monitoring systems or logs and excludes:
    • planned maintenance windows notified in advance;
    • emergency security patching or urgent changes;
    • failures of Customer Applications or code;
    • incidents caused by you, your users or your third parties; and
    • events outside our reasonable control (for example major internet outages, upstream provider failures).

2. Support hours

  1. Unless otherwise agreed, standard support hours for Cloud Services are:
    • Business Hours: 08:30-17:30 UK time on Business Days.
  2. Major, platform-level incidents that cause a complete loss of service for multiple customers may be handled outside Business Hours at our discretion.

3. Incident priorities and response targets

  1. We classify incidents as follows:
    • P1 - Critical: Complete loss of a production Cloud Service for a large number of users, with no workaround.
    • P2 - High: Significant degradation of a production Cloud Service, affecting multiple users, with only a partial workaround.
    • P3 - Medium: Issue affecting a small number of users or a non-critical component, or where a reasonable workaround exists.
    • P4 - Low / Request: Non-urgent issues, general questions, or minor change requests.
  2. During Business Hours, we aim to:
    • P1 - Critical: respond within 1 hour, begin investigation immediately, and work continuously within Business Hours (and outside Business Hours where we consider it necessary) until a workaround or resolution is in place;
    • P2 - High: respond within 2 hours and work within Business Hours until resolved or a suitable workaround is in place;
    • P3 - Medium: respond within 4 hours and schedule work within Business Hours; and
    • P4 - Low / Request: respond within 1 Business Day.
  3. These are response and effort targets, not guaranteed fix times. Resolution times depend on the complexity and nature of the incident.

4. Service credits (if applicable)

  1. Service credits only apply if they are explicitly included in your Order.
  2. Where applicable, service credits:
    • are calculated as a percentage reduction of the monthly recurring charges for the affected Cloud Service; and
    • are applied to a future invoice rather than paid in cash.
  3. Service credits are not available where:
    • you are in breach of the Agreement (including non-payment);
    • the issue arises from an Excluded Event; or
    • availability is impacted by factors outside our reasonable control.
  4. Service credits (if available) are your sole financial remedy for failure to meet availability targets under this Annex.

5. Excluded Events

  1. The following are “Excluded Events” for the purpose of availability calculations and service credits:
    • planned maintenance, upgrades or changes notified in advance;
    • emergency changes to resolve or mitigate critical security or stability issues;
    • failure, misconfiguration or behaviour of Customer Applications, Customer Data or third-party services under your control;
    • misuse of the Cloud Services or use outside the agreed or documented service scope;
    • failures of the public internet or third-party networks outside our reasonable control;
    • denial-of-service or other malicious attacks that could not reasonably have been prevented given the nature of the service; and
    • any force majeure event described in the Agreement.

6. Backup and recovery targets

  1. Backup and recovery targets are described in Schedule 3 and summarised here:
    • daily backups (unless otherwise agreed);
    • standard retention of up to 30 days (unless otherwise agreed);
    • RPO target of up to 24 hours for workloads with daily backups; and
    • RTO dependent on data size and complexity.
  2. In the event of a major incident, restore prioritisation will be agreed with you based on which systems are most critical to your business operations.

7. Provisioning and change targets

  1. We aim to:
    • provision standard Cloud Services (for example simple virtual machines or hosting plans) within 5 Business Days of agreeing your Order and receiving all pre-requisite information; and
    • implement minor changes (for example firewall rule adjustments, small resource changes) within 2 Business Days of an approved request.
  2. Complex builds, migrations or changes will be handled as projects and may have their own timelines agreed in a Statement of Work.