How US companies are ensuring business continuity when adopting SaaS
As an increasing number of US and Canadian enterprise companies are shifting to SaaS hosted applications, the demand for software escrow solutions with the ability to provide continuity is rapidly growing.
In the past, these enterprise companies would have avoided SaaS hosted applications due to concerns over the perceived risks of cloud hosted systems.
In recent years there has been major adoption of SaaS hosted applications including productivity apps such as Monday.com, Salesforce, Slack, and Trello. As these companies have become more comfortable with SaaS hosted apps, they are widening their adoption of anything from entire banking systems, police enforcement, airline management systems, insurance portals, ERP systems and more.
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Software vendors in North America are largely hosting their applications within AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). These platforms come with massive benefits in providing higher levels of information security, scalability and efficiencies compared to on-premise or data center hosted applications.
The risk for North American enterprise companies is that the solution and all their data is controlled by the software vendor. For enterprise companies to adopt SaaS hosted solutions in a responsible way, they need to ensure they have a third-party continuity process in place in the unlikely event something happens to the software vendor. Such events may include bankruptcy, major failure that remains unremedied or a ransomware attack.
Enterprise companies across the USA and Canada are turning to escrow vendors to develop robust SaaS continuity solutions that provide for a continuation of service if something were to happen to the software vendor. The most popular SaaS Continuity Escrow solutions include:
- Replicated SaaS Continuity with 90 Days of Live Availability – providing a replicated cloud environment with databases using CloudFormation/Terraform templates that may be activated in the event of a release situation. In the event of a release, the escrow vendor will be on hand to keep the lights on and provide a continuity of service for a period of up to 90 days.
- SaaS Environment Escrow – incorporating a deposit of the cloud environment which may include containers, deployment scripts, templates, automated deposits of databases and source code deposits from Git repositories including relevant documentation.
- SaaS Access Continuity – including the deposit of the developer’s access credentials to the cloud hosting vendor. Solutions include the transfer of the access credentials to the Beneficiary and the possibility of the escrow vendor maintaining the production environment for a 90 day period to ensure continuity post-release event.
- Vendor Financial Monitoring – assists in providing the beneficiary with pre-emptive alerts if the developer fails to pay their invoices.
Evan Lever, CEO of Escrow London commented, “We are seeing a dramatic increase in SaaS escrow requirements from Fortune 500 companies primarily from financial institutions, airlines and telecom companies who have shifted from data-center hosted solutions to applications hosted within AWS, Azure or GCP. These companies are coming up against major challenges due to regulatory requirements and huge amounts of data under management. Often these companies are opting for SaaS Access Continuity including a deposit of access credentials to the production account, source-code and deployment scripts as a preferred solution for robust continuity in the event of a SaaS vendor failure.”
About Escrow London
Escrow London is a global software escrow vendor headquartered in the United Kingdom. Our global coverage is provided across our London office, Escrow London North America Inc in Atlanta, and our Australian office in Sydney.
We have invested considerable resources into innovation to reinvent software escrow for a SaaS world. Escrow London provides a range of SaaS Continuity escrow solutions suitable for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform hosted SaaS applications. We support a wide range of clients includes major banks, central banks, insurance firms, technology companies and government.
