How Are Businesses Prepared For A SaaS Outage?

After Salesforce suffered a global outage, companies started realizing the fault lines underlying our business that they have grown too complacent about

Salesforce recently suffered its recent global outage. The outage can be considered a case study of how critical software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications have become modern businesses and how huge the impact can be when there's a problem. In addition, it has brought out many problems that companies merely overlooked. Mehdi Doudi, CEO and co-founder of CatchPoint, has written about how companies should prepare for the next such outage. 

Here is what he has written:

• Only when huge players like Google or Microsoft suffer an outage, we notice. So it's high time we pay more attention to our own SaaS vendors.

• The Salesforce outage may have revealed just how fragile some of our core business processes have become, but it can also motivate us to do better. Even if we can't eliminate the risk of SaaS failures, we can take steps to mitigate the impact.

• Demand transparency and have rapid communication from SaaS providers when they're having problems.

• Make sure your IT team can identify an outage. Use an endpoint solution to track employees' application experience and issue alerts if problems are identified. 

• Businesses should have detailed business continuity plans that activate in the time of a disaster or other major business disruption. 

• Perform a thorough review of your business processes and procedures. Keep on top of things in the digital realm, as it's likely you're now using services that may have required an SLA in the past but need one now.

What We Think?

The first step to solving a problem is to acknowledge its existence. IT leaders must take all measures possible within their budget to ensure that they have a bird’s- eye view of their entire SaaS ecosystem. Once they have this, they can implement processes to ensure the proper functioning of these applications and design contingency plans if needed.

You can read the full article here.