SaaS risks: Worst case scenario. What would you do?
Posted by Christine DeFazio on Mon, Mar 07, 2011
Post by: Ellen Oblen, Account Executive
Sounds like such a wonderful idea to buy software over the internet, doesn’t it! Just make sure that you have thought through all of the potential risks (and these are just a few) associated to this cost savings. You may end up having to work really hard to earn your savings.
Top questions to think about?
- Do you have access to your data? If you didn’t have access to your data, what business implications would there be in the time that would be lost retrieving the most up to date data? If you had it securely stored and knew exactly where to go to retrieve it, wouldn’t that be a great plan B for your business continuity?
- Is your data stored with the SaaS provider? We have heard and seen horror stories of the time it took to get data back from your provider to the data being returned in a format that is so difficult to port over to another provider. Would that time be lost revenue to your business?
- Is your data co-located on servers with many other clients? If you are a health care provider and your data is co-mingled with other’s data, does this breech every HIPPA law imaginable? Has your SaaS provider written a script to extract just your data to provide you at any time? JUST ASKIN’. Will they charge you more to do this service?
- How long would it take you to do a conversion of your data and application to another provider? How much data would you lose because of the costs involved? Data conversions are huge projects that are not simple and very costly!
Your escrow provider can help! Escrow vendors are being pulled into the SaaS market more and more everyday because of these same questions. We have developed solutions to specifically address the additional risks associated with the cloud that many may not be thinking about.
What SaaS escrow questions do you have? Have you experienced any similar issues mentioned above?