Business Continuity Solutions for SaaS Customers

Organizations are increasingly adopting SaaS-solutions in favor of traditional on-premise solutions, because of the advantages in terms of cost reduction, implementation time and scalability. Business continuity of these SaaS-solutions is often neglected, even when business processes that depend on the SaaS-solution are critical. This paper addresses business continuity for SaaS-solutions by identifying and evaluating different business continuity solutions to protect customers from the risk of their SaaS-provider going bankrupt. Two solutions; 'SaaS-escrow' and the 'SaaS-guarantee-fund', are evaluated in expert interviews and a survey. The conclusions of this research are that there is a need for SaaS business continuity solutions, SaaS continuity solutions are not frequently employed, and that the two solutions presented here are favored equally by a panel of business managers.