Maintaining Business Continuity With Mission-critical SaaS Applications
SaaS applications are universal features of the modern business world. Unfortunately, they don’t always come with the guarantees that they should.
No matter what kinds of software your clients license or use, they run the risk of massive failures if they don’t offset their dependency on vendors with viable backup plans. From data center disasters to software providers going under, your clients’ reliance on third-party tools endangers their day-to-day operations and ongoing profitability.
The Risk Defined: What Happens When Software Disappears?
Continuity is vital to doing business. Your clients’ customers won’t simply give them a pass because their software wasn’t working on a particular day or because they got hacked. Although most companies are diligent about securing their own internal systems, they expose themselves to the mercy of fate when it comes to their software vendors.
The dangers of ineffective continuity planning are all too real. Some sources estimate the amount of revenue lost annually to IT downtime to be in the $26 billion range.
The history of IT continuity planning is also riddled with examples of huge companies dropping the ball. For instance, Hurricane Sandy shut down the New York Stock Exchange in 2012, and as recently as 2008, Google Apps suffered major outages. The IT world has certainly come a long way since those dark days, but such events still underscore the need for corporate continuity planning that ensures companies can keep functioning after they lose vital services and SaaS components.