Salesforce.com's latest outage

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John Paczkowski on AllThingsD is reporting an outage at Salesforce.com. That’s bound the get the SaaS naysayers rearing up on hind legs with ‘told you so’ style epithets. To do so would be to miss the point.

The best response I’ve seen comes from Jeff Grosse who comments:

While at one point, just over 50% of the Salesforce production instances were unavailable, it’s also important to ask the question which Salesforce customers were prepared for the occasion with their data offline via Salesforce Mobile or Salesforce Offline. Though searching would not be available beyond the data sets locally stored, companies who have planned for just such an event by deploying the (included) two offline products could have mitigated the effect of such an outage. Salesforce Mobile lets users continue to use their data whether Salesforce is up or not. And when Salesforce comes back online, all changes made will be synched back to Salesforce. The same goes for offline.

This is not a “the sky is falling” moment. It was an inconvenience to those it affected, but servers were back up in about 60 minutes or less. Many on-premise solutions do not even have such offline capabilities, nor would they necessarily be back online in <60 minutes. There’s a chance it will happen again. Will it be this week, not likely; this year, I suppose it could.

So there you have it. The question for those using SaaS accounting solutions: does your provider have similar capabilities? If not then what’s your strategy for managing this type of problem?

Side note. The original report talks of Salesforce.com’s 16 instances of its service. Realize what that means? No-one questions Salesforce.com’s multi-tenancy story but even they have to manage massive scaling issues by adding in separate resources. It puts an end to the notion that multi-tenancy must equate to a single instance.

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