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 Agreements – FAQs – What is a SLA?

SLA is the common abbreviation used for a service level agreement. When providing SaaS services to customers you need to include a SLA in your SaaS agreement, either as part of the main terms of your SaaS agreement or in a specific SLA schedule. A SLA should set out the following support and maintenance services that you will provide to customers to ensure that the SaaS software is made properly available to them.

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SaaS Agreements – Terms and Conditions – Subcontractors and Outsourcing

The terms of your SaaS agreement must include the right to use sub-contractors as 99% of SaaS suppliers use at least one sub-contractor – a third party data centre – to host their SaaS software. SaaS customers often try to prohibit the use of sub-contractors or place severe restrictions on their use by insisting that they must give prior consent to each sub-contractor. This is not acceptable for practical reasons as often numerous sub-contractors are used in providing the SaaS services and these sub-contractors will change over time.

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SaaS Agreements – SLA – Terms to Include

The above is a general guide to the terms to include in a SLA for a SaaS agreement. The degree of detail that you provide will largely depend upon the following:

The type of SaaS products and services you are supplying;
How much the customer pays for the SaaS product and services;
Whether the SaaS product is business critical i.e. online banking;
What is standard in that particular business area.

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