Worse still: If disaster struck the Internet, your cloud shares, or the cloud-based Line of Business application(s) that everybody uses in your industry, would you lose your customers or would you be the last competitor standing?

Software as a Service (SaaS) applications are convenient because you do not need to maintain them and you do not need Windows® PC’s to use them. But SaaS applications are not invulnerable, and you do need an Internet connection to run them.

Your Line of Business software vendors and your local ISP can have outages. Microsoft 365®, Azure® AD, Netsuite®, QuickBooks Online®, and Salesforce.com® have outages. The cloud infrastructure suppliers they run on have outages as well (Amazon AWS®, IBM Cloud®, Rackspace®, Microsoft Azure®, Google Cloud®…).

Even the Tier 1 Internet carriers they all rely upon experience them (Level 3®, CenturyLink®, Comcast®…). Outages rarely last more than a couple of hours or days, but they can. Cloud host Linode® was offline for 12 days while under a DDoS attack in 2016.

In some cases, client data is lost or stolen (transactions, credentials, credit card data…).

Your data can also be damaged by a hacker, a rogue application, an employee, or when a user account is terminated, etc.

The trade-off for the convenience, the scalability, and the low cost of SaaS applications is reduced-control and added-complexity.

From multiple points of failures that could be mitigated with redundancy in a self-hosted environment (i.e.: servers, routers, switches, security, power, cabling), you now have one big point of failure over which you have no control.

So you should do your utmost to protect your data and maintain or reintroduce redundancy.

Whenever possible, you should have clone instances of your linchpin LOB programs running on local or cloud servers ready to be fired-up. You should have local and/or cloud copies of your OneDrive and Google Drive data.

You should back up your cloud data rigorously. Most SaaS vendors stipulate in their terms that backups fall under your responsibility. When they hold backups, it is usually for short periods of time, and recovery fees can be steep (a flat $10,000 with Salesforce.com and the process can take weeks).

Should things go bad, our clients would live to tell the tale.