December 22, 2005

Salesforce.com's Outage - How Can You Protect Yourself

Salesforce.com's service was out for several hours on Tuesday. MANY times computer systems go down, this should be expected. HOWEVER, for the service provider and the customer who is relying on 100% uptime this is something to seriously consider.

If your small business is relying on a hosted application for mission critical work and your host goes down - you are OUT of business and lose money for that downtime.

Is there any solution? I'd like to think that Salesforce.com spends a LOT of money to have its systems as good as possible. This can happen to hosted and not hosted systems but what can small businesses to BE PREPARED for things like this. How can they pick a service provider that will be up and running more than others? I've got a lot of questions here and I hope someone has answers.

Cnet writes A Salesforce.com outage lasting nearly a day cut off access to critical business data for many of the company's customers on Tuesday in what appears to be Salesforce's most severe service disruption to date.

Salesforce stores customer information for thousands of businesses, delivering data "on-demand" via the Web. The lack of that data interfered with some customers' sales and customer service activities on a critical pre-holiday business day.

"This is not just an inconvenience. We're losing sales," said Charlie Crystle, CEO of Mission Research, a software company in Lancaster, Pa. "It's a busy time of the year."

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