There are some very important conversations taking place around the blogosphere on the subject of Business Continuity and SaaS. I've commented on many of the posts, often multiple times, to share my opinions and learn from others. I wanted to put together a list of the blogs maintaining these conversations (below) and encourage others to participate.
As I said in some of the comments I've made, large SaaS vendors have already solved the issue of Business Continuity. Where the problem lies is with small SaaS vendors that cannot effectively "self insure" against failure. Until a third-party steps up with something that is aligned not only with the SaaS vendors (someone who understands completely the unique SaaS Business Architecture) and even more importantly aligned with their clients, small and medium-sized SaaS vendors will have trouble with how to solve this problem.
The subject of Business Continuity, remember, is not for the SaaS Vendor, but for their clients; the end-users. For Software-as-a-Service to be taken seriously, these issues must be talked about and ultimately solved. Too often, the risks associated with SaaS are overblown by Legacy Software vendors spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) about SaaS. Security risks, availability, etc. For the most part, the FUD they spew is just anti-SaaS rhetoric since they missed the SaaS boat and are now trying to play catch-up. In many cases, its just a stalling mechanism to keep people from adopting their competitors SaaS products until they can release their (poorly executed?) SaaS "version." When that happens, mysteriously, the SaaS FUD disappears.
The problem is, that there are some issues that need to be dealt with, and Business Continuity is one of them. We could opt not to "air our dirty laundry" and those of us in the "SaaS business" could defend to no end that anything negative about SaaS is just FUD, but the truth is somewhere in the middle.
My motivation to continue these conversations is two-fold:
1) Get to a point where all FUD from Legacy Software vendors or other anti-SaaS folks is easily defended against by SaaS vendors of *all* sizes and stages.
2) Stop legacy escrow companies or other legacy vendors, ASP vendors, etc. from capitalizing on either SaaS's potential problems (on the ultra-rare occasion a vendor will fail) and/or the fast growing popularity of SaaS by associating their decidedly non-SaaS products with Software-as-a-Service.
Read on, and most importantly, participate!
- Post by @benkepes on Cloud Avenue "SaaS Certainty - Escrow is the Answer"
- Post by @fscavo on his blog: "SaaS contingency plans need more than software escrow"
Author: Lincoln Murphy (you should follow me on Twitter)