More Holiday Madness

So the stockings are hung by fire with care in hopes that St. Nicholas will soon be there, but most New Yorkers are probably wishing most for one thing - the end of the transit strike. As for many of Salesforce.com 350,000 customers, they are probably longing to erase the six hours of lost access to their Salesforce apps just as they are wrapping up their year-end numbers. A database cluster error led was the underlying cause.Most customers seemed to have a laid back response, recognizing that given the fact that Salesforce.com had only recently opened a new backup data center in San Francisco, there were bound to be initial problems. However, the lost access does point to the need for companies to do two things. First, they need to have a more thorough back up and failover plan in the event of an issue. Secondly, businesses need to communicate with their customers about outages and other service issues.

That lack of communication seemed to be the one complaint customers really lodged against the application provider. And that is a common complaint from customers of other solution providers. Anyway, 'tis the season for vendors to reconsider how they alert their clients to changes. Even if the worst happens and service is knocked offline, if customers are made aware of how long the outage may be and what their provider is doing to fix it they can find away to work around it themselves and the loss will be less devastating.