No, Chicken Little, the (SaaS) sky is not falling

Yesterday there was a Salesforce.com outage that lasted somewhere between 30-40 minutes. In the 24-hours since that time, the blogosphere has been filled with various pundits spreading doom and gloom, saying this outage proves Cloud Computing is not a prudent business decision.

Sorry, Chicken Little, the SaaS sky is not falling. Cloud computing is here to stay. If anything, yesterday's outage is proof to me how much better off we are running our business in the clouds.

When the Salesforce.com outage started, dozens of IT engineers jumped into action, working to first isolate the problem and correct it. In the aftermath, today and for the rest of the week, dozens of technical teams will be working to understand what went wrong, how it went wrong, and what they can do to prevent it from happening again.

The best part? None of those people are on my company's payroll. It's a good thing -- I couldn't afford that many IT and support staff. Yet I am very thankful that they're on my "cloud", helping me run my business. I wouldn't be able to administer such an incredible CRM tool without their help.

When the outage started, I didn't call Salesforce.com; I saw that several folks on Twitter had already done so. I sent out an internal email telling colleagues "we are aware of the problem with Salesforce.com, and have people working on it right now." Yep, I had people working on it!

I switched our Support team over to our Salesforce Offline Viewer. It's a custom PHP application accessing a SQL server database that we designed several months ago. Through the Salesforce API, we update the SQL database every 24-hours with a complete copy of all transactions we've entered into Salesforce.com. The GUI isn't as pretty as Salesforce, but it contains all the data they need: Cases, Solutions, Contacts, Accounts, and various custom objects.

I then set up a "Salesforce" Twitter search on my TweetDeck, sat back, and watched for news that people were able to finally log in. I've never had to spend less resources and manpower managing a crisis.

This 40-minute service outage was a blip. Let me tell you about another recent outage at my company, this one not related to the services we have running in the Cloud.

A few weeks ago, we had a little ice storm here on the east coast. It knocked out phone lines and electrical power for hundreds of thousands of New England residents. Our company lost power for 4-days. The backup generator lasted for about 10 hours, and then it went offline, too. Everything was down: telephone service, electrical power, heat.

Employees couldn't communicate with each other over Blackberry or email, because the Outlook exchange server was down. Customers couldn't access our corporate website. All of our critical IT systems are redundant, with a co-lo on a completely separate power grid. Even that didn't help us, as this storm had knocked out both power grids (yes, we're moving the co-lo further away -- and let me tell you that is a huge project in itself!).

Every member of our IT and support staff began round the clock shifts, working to get our back-up generators back online, contacting utility vendors and facility managers, shutting down servers and equipment to protect from power spikes, etc. It was exhausting!

The one aspect of our business that was unaffected? Salesforce.com. We were able to communicate outwardly to customers via Salesforce. That allowed us to send a Mass Email to all Customers, providing them with alternate contact numbers for accessing our Customer Support staff. We modified the home page layout, to include status updates for all employees logging in to Salesforce from home.

The sales team, 90% of whom are remote, were able to conduct business as usual. After we altered the call routing for our main support phone #, the entire customer support team was able to work from home, too. They had full access to Cases, Solutions, and other information they use in Salesforce -- as if they were in the office.

The four-day service outage was seamless to our Customers, thanks to the Cloud. Thanks to Salesforce.com.

I compare these two outages -- especially the manpower and resources that went into restoring service fully and I know that Cloud Computing is the right model for our CRM service.

Perhaps all these blogging pundits have Cracker Jack IT teams, allowing all their in-house systems to operate with 99.999% up-time. If so, I hope they give special thanks to each and every member of their IT staff, and maybe a nice fat bonus at the end of the year.

Me? I work in a place called reality. And even though my company has the very best of IT folks, they are resource constrained. They do capacity planning, integration testing, and constant tuning of our many complex business systems. But Salesforce's IT team is bigger, and comparing the availability numbers between our in-house and cloud-based systems just wouldn't be fair.

So cheer up, Chicken Little, you've got people.