The question what happens with the data if SaaS vendor flops or has a devastating outage keeps coming up. Here is some feedback on that based on my favorite session from recent SaaSCon conference. For a little under an hour three SaaS PPM clients were grilled by SaaS vendors in the audience on this and similar issues.

Their responses were: store the source code for technology in escrow, back up, and develop scenarios for emergency situations. They admitted that none of them actually has gone through emergency drills. One company also commented that data preservation was not mission critical for their specific setting and it is important distinction to keep in mind.

When working with SaaS, client companies need to develop awareness on how important is the data preservation and/or availability for the specific Web-based service they are using. In some cases periodic lack of availability (and even possible loss of the data in its entirety) will not disrupt operations, and thus may not be worth increased concerns and resulting costs. However, when the data is vital, it is worthwhile to at least minimally go through the steps that these client companies went through. I would argue that when data is critical they should try to go further and run through at least some of possible outage scenarios.