The Three Rs of SaaS; Reliability, Resiliency and Recoverability (2024)

Customers demand a high service level agreement (SLA) when they entrust their data to a SaaS solution. Providers have to be prepared to deliver solutions that are always on and always improving. The more resilient a provider is in the handling of unplanned events will directly impact the users trust while meeting customer expectations.

The costs of failing to be resilient, and having to recover, during an unplanned events are alarming in so many respects. The impact to customer satisfaction and trust and the providers pressure to restore quickly while protecting the brand. Post incident, the customer has to review their business continuity plans and the provider has to mitigate the risk.

The three R’s are Reliability, Resiliency and Recoverability and they are connected. Unplanned events that are not covered with reliability then become a resiliency event. Events that are not handled through resiliency can become a recovery event. ScienceDirect 2 paints the picture of this progression.

Defining the 3 Rs

• Reliability is when the user consistently has the same experience with a service. This includes all the components that make up a user experience such as the user interface, integration, performance and security to name a few. Reliability has to be a tenant of our culture with a focus on customer expectations. It gets manifested through execution and processes resulting in our customers satisfaction and high SLAs.

A Reliability event should be minimally perceivable, if at all, to the user. Reliability sets the baseline of a users satisfaction of our products and trust in our protection of their data.

• Resiliency is the the proven ability to recover from an adverse event within the customers service level agreement/recovery time objective (SLA/RTO). The objective with resiliency is to prevent or withstand an unplanned event from impacting service availability and data loss.

Resiliency events should be carefully analyzed (root cause analysis) and determine how this event can be handled in the future through Reliability.

• Recoverability is the ability to restore services after a failure, or unplanned event for which resiliency did not protect against. The objective of recoverability is to be able restore normal operations after an unplanned event. For most SaaS vendors the RTO is adjusted and SLA is breached. Depending on the severity of the event, SaaS provider can experience some or all of the following:
• Damaged customer trust
• Increased customer churn
• Reduction in new business
• Additional scrutiny from current and potential clients
• Financial exposure for SLA breach

Recoverability capabilities must be proven and mature since it is not possible or feasible to protect against all hazards with Reliability and Resilience.