Access industry-leading expertise.

Our IaaS, like all IBM products and services, is backed by our global network of experts and expertise. Our forum, premium, and add-on support services can help to enhance the availability and security of your virtual server environment.

Forum Support

Complimentary technical support for all services is available through the cloud web portal and by checking the online cloud forum pages after login. Around-the-clock monitoring and management of the cloud infrastructure includes:

• Security activities for the IBM cloud data center base infrastructure to govern access to and use of our services
• Scheduled maintenance for the IBM cloud data center base infrastructure to maintain our services

Premium Support

You can purchase Premium Support services that extend the complimentary Forum Support with an around-the-clock telephone help desk routing office and a web-based ticketing system to submit and review service requests. This premium support service provides users with remote technical support to assist them in using the cloud web portal, accessing services, creating instances and managing image functions within the portal. When requesting assistance, a user will provide a detailed description of the problem, error codes and all relevant and available diagnostic information.

Support for IBM images or third-party images is not provided under these premium support services. Such support may be available under a separate agreement from IBM (for example, software subscription and support agreement) or from a third-party vendor.

All support is provided in English.

Advanced Premium Support

Advanced Premium Support includes the services of Premium Support plus:

• Severity-level-driven response times, from 30 minutes for severity 1 (severe business impact) to 24 hours for severity 4 (no business impact)
• A service level agreement (SLA) with refunds, should IBM not meet committed response times

Add-on operating system support

If you purchase one of the Premium Support services, you can choose to add support for the Linux or Microsoft Windows operating systems that IBM provides.

• Usage and configuration questions and general guidance on Linux product documentation
• Assistance to isolate problem causes and provide recovery information if available from the vendor
• Availability of new fixes to help cope with emergency situations
• Remote access to your instances, with your permission and participation, to assist in isolating a software problem cause
• Reporting of new (unknown) defects to the operating system vendor

The Advanced Premium Support SLA does not apply to these add-on services. These services do not include support for operating systems that you import into the cloud.

Onboarding services

IBM offers a fee-based onboarding service to familiarize account administrators and end users with the services available via web portal. It consists of four hours of interactive presentations and demonstrations provided remotely over the Internet in English. Account administrator functions as well as the process of ordering and provisioning virtual compute resources are reviewed in detail.