Procurement guy here. What SLAs should I demand in the migration contract?

I really like the idea of tying the validation start date to a specific business event like month-end close. That makes it real.

But, as a beginner here, I'm wondering how you handle the situation if your business cycles are longer or more complex? Like, what if you have a sales team that works on quarterly deals? Is one month enough to catch all the quirks?

Right on the money. Your point about the validation environment is critical, but who's paying for the sandbox? If they provide it, it's in their interest to keep it small and cheap, which can skew performance results. Negotiate that the sandbox mirrors your production tier specs at their cost for the validation period.

And on logs - what's the format? Demand structured, queryable logs (like JSON or CloudWatch exports), not just a text dump. If the report fails, you need to pinpoint if it's a data mismatch, a timeout, or a system error within 15 minutes.