Many Software As A Service (SAAS) issues have been addressed frequently – who owns the data if the provider goes bankrupt? What about security and confidentiality? Is there provision for running locally if the Internet goes down? The need for a good license agreement is clear.
However, here’s one that I have never seen addressed at all, and it could be extremely important. One of the advantages touted by the SAAS providers is that the software is patched and updated centrally, without all the pain usually associated with doing an in-house updates. So your software is always up to date.
But in this day and age of yearly updates, new patches are increasingly bringing along new bugs of their own. Time Matters users have seen this happen repeatedly in the last several services releases, and Microsoft patches have been notorious for breaking things for years.
In some cases, these new bugs may affect you not at all or minimally. However, a not insignificant number of firms have reported having to “roll back” a patch to the previous release due to issues it created. So, this raises two questions: If you subscribe to a given software via SAAS, when the vendor patches or updates the software,
(1) Will you be notified of the patch/update before hand? and
(2) Does the vendor commit to rolling back the patch if it causes problems for your site (at your sole discretion)?
These provisions would be critical points to include in any contract.
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