SaaS Agreements – SLAs – Business Continuity and Escrow Agents

SaaS customers are increasingly asking for disaster recover provisions to be included within the terms of a SaaS agreement to ensure that they have access to their data and continuity of service if a problem arises at the SaaS supplier’s data centre. The costs of providing disaster recovery used to be prohibitive, due to the requirement of having mirrored servers and transferring data, however there is now a new market opening up with former escrow providers offering a variety of disaster recovery options at affordable prices.

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SaaS, ASP Agreements – FAQs – Escrow

When negotiating a SaaS agreement you may come across the term escrow. What is escrow and is an escrow agreement necessary? Under the terms of a SaaS agreement you do not own or have any rights to the software (which includes the source code) that you are accessing. This is usually not an issue until technical problems arise, i.e. unexpected service interruptions, downtime, loss of application functionality and loss of data. This can add significant costs to your business and you are dependent upon the supplier to resolve these issues, unless you have an escrow agreement in place.

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