A company exchanges information with a business partner. An annual audit of the business partner is conducted against the SLA in order to verify:

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) formally defines the expected level of service, including specific performance objectives like uptime, throughput, and response times, along with other service delivery metrics. An audit against an SLA directly verifies if the business partner is adhering to these agreed-upon quantitative and qualitative targets for service availability and performance.

While backups are a critical operational control, auditing against an SLA focuses on the overall service levels and performance metrics, not solely on the execution and testing of a specific operational task like backups.

Data ownership is a legal and contractual aspect, separate from the measurable performance and service delivery metrics typically defined and verified within an SLA.

Risk awareness is a broad security and governance concern, but an SLA audit specifically targets the measurable performance and delivery aspects of the service provided, rather than general adherence to risk principles.