Last week Salesforce.com the Software as a Service (SaaS, previously known as Application Service Provider) shut down a partner site for some planned maintenance. The problem with this seems to be that Salesforce.com think they informed their partners of this, while their partners think they did not!
While this raises the obvious questions of communication and making sure you tell everyone, or at least your partners (they are your customers after all), what is going on, it also raises a very serious issue for the partners.
This issue is very simply, if you put critical applications in the hands of third parties you have to ensure the service you receive is very clearly defined in a Service Level Agreement (SLA) and known to everyone involved in the process. While everyone will make a mistake and every application system will have a glitch at some point, it is how you manage this that counts. It’s also prudent to make sure you have a back up plan.
This back up plan should be proportionate to the risk involved: if you risk losing everything then it’s worth investing in a serious back up plan or a full business continuity plan, if it’s just some data that you already have on an alternative system, then you are probably fine.
It’s good to learn from other people’s mistakes so that we don’t make the same mistakes!
Posted by Jim Stevenson 
Bletchley Group 