- AMC
- Annual maintenance contract: an agreement to maintain equipment or systems for a period, with agreed visits and response.
- Comprehensive vs non-comprehensive
- Comprehensive covers parts and labour. Non-comprehensive covers labour only and parts are charged separately.
- SOP
- Standard operating procedure: the written, repeatable way a task is done.
- SLA
- Service level agreement: measurable response, restoration and availability targets, agreed in writing.
- OLA and UC
- Operational level agreement (internal hand-offs) and underpinning contract (third parties). The agreements underneath an SLA.
- L1, L2, L3
- Support levels by technical depth: first contact, engineers, and specialists or the manufacturer.
- P1 to P4
- Priority levels from critical to low, based on impact and urgency, each with its own targets.
- MTTA and MTTR
- Mean time to acknowledge and to restore. The main measures of support speed.
- CMDB
- Configuration management database: the record of what you own and how the pieces connect.
- RCA
- Root-cause analysis: finding and fixing why something failed, so it does not fail again.
- RMA
- Return merchandise authorisation: the manufacturer's process for replacing a faulty unit under warranty.
- NOC
- Network operations centre: the team and tooling that watch infrastructure health.
- Break-fix vs managed
- Break-fix is paid per incident after something breaks. Managed support is a continuous, preventive arrangement.
- SPOC
- Single point of contact: one number and one team for every request.
- Hypercare
- A period of extra attention right after a go-live or takeover.
- vCIO
- Virtual chief information officer: senior IT advisory on strategy, budget and risk, without a full-time hire.