What happens if your SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS vendor closes shop?

 

In response to the following topic on a SaaS forum:

I haven't seen a lot of direct answers to this topic, so I'd like to hear from SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS providers on how they answer this question for their customers. What assurances to give them against this possibility? What contingencies are typically built into contracts?

I posted the following response:

Even though most people here say that their product allows for backups or exports of data the truth is that most SaaS applications don't have this capability at all, or have it in a limited fashion that would be extremely difficult to migrate elsewhere without a ton of work. These concerns about data ownership and disaster recovery (ie. going out of business) are some of the top concerns that our partners hear on a daily basis in their sales calls. For larger deployments many customers are demanding escrow type solutions for their data or other legal mechanisms for addressing their concerns.

Having a backup or export functionality as part of the solution that a customer is buying is often not actually a viable option. So many of these export capabilities in SaaS apps require an administrator to go in and make a request through a webpage and then go back and download it once the export has been completed and an email sent notifying them of it. For an organization that has backup solutions in place, adding a manual step is likely to get missed, error prone, and untenable. When IT wants to back up an application in their own data center they automate every step of it using highly sophisticated backup tools. This is one of the things that is hindering adoption of SaaS. There is a need for SaaS applications to be able to play nice with existing IT infrastructure and processes and they currently just don't do that.

This is what my company, Centripetal Software, is attempting to address. There is a need to extend IT out from within the organization to the SaaS applications that the Line Of Business wants to use. Bringing critical business data back into the organization is a key requirement for many, and this must be done reliably and in an automated fashion. Our product, Centripetal Retrieve, integrates with existing cloud based applications to provide full and incremental backups of data and files and integrate them into IT infrastructure within an organization. http://www.centripetalsoftware.com