Our customer service objectives

The goal of Service Objectives (SO) is to publicize our operating procedures and provide transparency about our operation of Cloud.gov. We publish our SOs in lieu of establishing a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Our objectives are:

• Present a clear and concise description of our service.
• Provide clear reference to service ownership, accountability, roles and responsibilities.

Our program’s top priorities are:

1. Compliance - Applications running on cloud.gov gain the inheritance model provided by FedRAMP JAB’s Moderate P-ATO. By focusing on FedRAMP compliance, we are ensuring all the applications on the platform remain compliant.
2. Safety & Security - We maintain a large platform with many different applications. Tenant safety is of the utmost importance to ensure that all our customers are safe from interference and abuse.
3. Transparency - We publish metrics and status updates about the platform as events happen. Our code base is open to the public and we provide customers visibility in our process.

Our performance goals:

• We publicly publish real time metrics regarding platform availability at https://cloudgov.statuspage.io.
• For incidents, we consider less than 90% availability over one hour as an incident (6 minute outage), less than 97% over a 24-hour period (43 minute outage)>
  • Our site is “unavailable” if more than 10% of public users are experiencing issues.

Our support availability:

• Email support (Monday - Friday): 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Eastern Time
• Emails received outside of office hours will be prioritized the next business day.

Our maintenance policy:

• We perform system maintenance and upgrades in the middle of the week (Tuesday to Thursday) to make sure all our staff are available during the maintenance window.

We prioritize communication in the following order:

• For issues that impact platform availability: within 3 business hours.
• For issues that impact provisioning services: within two business days.
• For all other issues: within five business days.

For issues that impact the platform or services we will:

• Log communication and coordination between the team to resolve the issue.
• Hold a retrospective to analyze and report on follow-up items and lessons-learned.
• For security incidents, we follow the process outlined in our Incident Response.