Designing an Azure support SLA in the UK

When uptime equals reputation, you need a contract that proves reliability. At Growcreate, we design, host and support Microsoft Azure and Umbraco platforms for enterprise organisations across finance, nonprofits and professional services.

This playbook shows how we design Azure support SLAs that deliver under-1-hour targets, true 24/7 cover and fixed-price packages — backed by clear escalation, proactive monitoring and measurable outcomes.

Takeaway: fast responses, steady comms and predictable cost.

Choose a plan that matches your SLA

What good looks like

An effective SLA turns business outcomes into hard targets:

• Defined severities with measurable response times — under 1 hour for high-impact incidents.
• 24/7 cover with an out-of-hours rota, including weekends and UK bank holidays.
• A documented escalation ladder to senior engineers, a duty manager and Microsoft where needed.
• Proactive monitoring that alerts by phone, SMS, email and webhooks.
• Post-incident reviews and monthly reports that drive actions.

Microsoft’s Professional Direct support targets a sub-1-hour initial response for critical incidents — we align escalation where the cause sits in Azure (ProDirect, response definitions).

Takeaway: your SLA mirrors the platform’s support model, so responsibilities are clear.

Map outcomes to targets

Start with the business outcome, then set service levels that back it up. Tie them to RTO (maximum downtime) and RPO (maximum data loss) using the Well-Architected reliability metrics. Takeaway: recovery targets match the risk you are willing to carry.

Severity and response matrix

Packages aligned to your SLA

Choose a package that matches platform risk and team capacity. All tiers include uncapped P1/P2 to SLA, ticketing, monitoring and an annual health check. Extended coverage add-ons unlock earlier starts, later finishes or full 24/7.

Essential

• Coverage — 1 solution; 9 am–5 pm Mon–Fri
• Application reporting and monitoring
• Application care — codebase management, security patches, managed backups, Dev/Staging/Prod, CI/CD
• Security — TLS/SSL certificate management, encryption at rest

Best for: lower-risk sites that need steady maintenance and defined incident handling.

Takeaway: stable base with clear SLAs and essential security.

Standard (most popular)

Everything in Essential, plus:

• Coverage — dedicated account manager; quarterly catch-ups
• Application care — minor version updates
• Cloud security — IP blocking / access-listing
• Cloud monitoring — uptime checks every 1 minute from 16 locations

Best for: active sites needing tighter monitoring and change cadence.

Takeaway: better visibility and faster insight into issues.

Advanced

Everything in Standard, plus:

• Coverage — monthly catch-ups; monthly core vitals; quarterly health check
• Application care — technical debt, search reindexing, user assistance, portal access
• Cloud monitoring — auto-restart

Best for: platforms with ongoing optimisation and editorial cadence.

Takeaway: continuous improvement with light engineering uplift.

Premium

A premium service for businesses that need ultimate care and priority access.

Everything in Advanced, plus:

• Coverage — uncapped P0 SLA; fortnightly catch-ups; monthly health check; passive code scanning
• Application care — performance optimisation (APM), automated testing
• User assistance — private MS Teams channel, screen shares
• Managed cloud services — failover to static site, out-of-hours deployments, cost and performance optimisation, CDN, green-blue deployments
• Cloud security — WAF, DDoS protection, HSTS, Azure Security Centre

Best for: mission-critical platforms with strict RTO and near-zero RPO.

Takeaway: priority access, deeper automation and enterprise-grade resilience.

See full details on our website maintenance packages and related services: Azure support services, Azure managed service, Azure DevOps services.

Extended coverage options

• +4 hours — Mon–Fri 7 am–7 pm
• +8 hours — Mon–Fri 5 am–9 pm
• +16 hours — Mon–Fri, including bank holidays
• 24/7 — Mon–Sun, including bank holidays

Takeaway: align cover to trading hours, release windows and risk.

Proactive monitoring and alerting

We design the stack to catch issues before users do:

• Azure Monitor action groups
• Azure Service Health — service incidents, maintenance and advisories
• Application Insights — availability and performance trends
• Dynamic thresholds and alert processing rules to keep the signal high and noise low

Takeaway: the right people get the right alert first time.

Availability targets and the platform under the SLA

Support SLAs sit on top of Azure SLAs. We design for those numbers:

• Azure SQL Database offers 99.99% baseline availability, rising to 99.995% with zone redundancy on supported tiers (Microsoft Learn)
• For strict RTO/RPO, use auto-failover groups for cross-region resilience, then test, time and log results.

Takeaway: targets are realistic because the architecture supports them.

Communications that keep people calm

During a live incident, we:

1. Open the incident and page on-call via action groups
2. Put a senior engineer in technical lead, and a duty manager on comms
3. Escalate to Microsoft within 30 minutes for suspected platform faults, aligning with ProDirect handling
4. Issue timestamped updates with plain language and a next update time

Takeaway: engineers fix, stakeholders stay informed.

How we manage support tickets

All Support runs through Teamwork Desk with transparent statuses:

• Active
• Under investigation
• Waiting on customer
• Awaiting stage deploy
• Awaiting live deploy
• On hold, Solved.

Takeaway: You can see progress at a glance.

Compliance and data handling

If you process personal data, include breach response. The ICO expects certain personal data breaches to be reported within 72 hours where feasible. Financial services should align resilience with FCA/PRA policy on impact tolerances for important business services. For EU users, refer to Microsoft’s EU Data Boundary and Azure data residency.

Takeaway: your SLA maps to regulator expectations and platform controls.

Support. Enhance. Evolve.

• Support — incident response, triage, root cause, rollbacks, restarts, security incident response
• Enhance — uptime monitoring, capacity forecasting, core vitals, quarterly health checks, cloud security policies, vendor liaison.
• Evolve — APM, automated testing, passive code scanning, enterprise security (WAF, DDoS, HSTS, Azure Security Centre), failover to static site, green-blue and out-of-hours deployments, cost optimisation.

Takeaway: a path from stability to performance to resilience.

Ready to define your SLA

We design, migrate and support .NET, Azure and Umbraco platforms and business systems. Book a short consultation and we’ll map workloads, define RPO/RTO, and build the right SLA for your platform.

Book your free SLA consultation