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Privacy Level Agreement

Privacy level agreements, service level agreements, and operational level agreements each serve distinct roles in managing vendor relationships and data handling expectations. Understanding when and why to use each helps organizations meet growing privacy regulatory requirements.

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About this video

Growing privacy legislation is pushing organizations to formalize not only their own data handling practices but also the standards they require from external service providers. Three types of agreements come into play in this context: the service level agreement, the operational level agreement, and the privacy level agreement, each targeting a different aspect of the vendor relationship. A service level agreement sets measurable performance expectations—such as uptime guarantees—and is the most widely used of the three. An operational level agreement goes a step further by defining how a provider fulfills those service commitments internally, though it is less commonly required since many organizations care only about outcomes rather than processes. The privacy level agreement applies a similar contractual framework specifically to privacy practices, establishing clear expectations for how personal data is handled by a third party. Despite increasing regulatory pressure, privacy level agreements remain relatively rare in the field. Their obligations are typically absorbed into a general privacy policy or incorporated into an operational level agreement, making standalone privacy level agreements uncommon but worth understanding as privacy compliance requirements continue to evolve.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Privacy & Service Agreements

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+
5.1 Summarize elements of effective security governance.
5.3 Explain the processes associated with third-party risk assessment and management.
ISC2 CISSP
1.6 Develop, document, and implement security policy, standards, procedures, and guidelines
NIST CSF
GV.SC-05 Requirements to address cybersecurity risks in supply chains are established, prioritized, and integrated into contracts and other types of agreements with suppliers and other relevant third parties.

Key terms

Service Level Agreement
SLA
A formal commitment between a provider and customer that guarantees a defined level of service uptime, including terms for compensation if the standard is not met.
Operational Level Agreement
OLA
An internal agreement that defines the responsibilities and service expectations between departments within the same organization in support of an SLA.
Privacy Level Agreement
PLA
An agreement between an organization and a service provider that defines expectations and requirements for how personal or sensitive data will be handled and protected.

Topics

Privacy Level Agreements Service Level Agreements Operational Level Agreements Vendor Management Data Privacy Regulatory Compliance

Transcript

There are more and more laws and regulations that are coming out dealing with privacy, and so it's really important we implement good privacy practices within our own company. But when we're dealing with some sort of service provider, we may need to require them to have similar requirements with how they handle privacy, and in that case we may want to fill out a privacy level pla.

A service level agreement sets the expectations of what type of service levels they're going to be for any type of service, and a good measurement for that would be like uptime. An operational level is how they fulfill those services, versus a privacy level agreement is expectations when it comes to privacy.

Here's an example of a privacy level agreement. This is from the University of Brighton, and as we scroll through here it looks like several of our other contracts, but in this case it has to deal with privacy.

How Common Are These Agreements

So you may ask, how common are these three documents, these three agreements? Well, the SLA is very common. If you're a service provider, you probably have an SLA. If somebody's providing you services, you're probably going to want to verify and see their service level agreement.

However, an operational level agreement isn't as widely used. You may care about the service level that you're receiving, but you might not care about how they're approaching getting those service levels, and so in that case right there you may not need an operational level agreement. So it's not nearly as common.

The privacy level agreement, you don't see a lot of these out there. A lot of it's just covered by the privacy policy, or it could be wrapped up in the operational level agreement. So you just don't see as much of the privacy level agreements out there.

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