Operating a SaaS product through ownership changes

3rd party services checklist

First list all the online services your SaaS business depends on. You can usually do this by going through the business bank or credit card statement. If you rely on many free services, that makes live a little more complicated but you can still comb through your e-mails to refresh your memory about what you signed up for and what you actually use.

For each service, list at the bare minimum:

• Name of the service and its URL
• Purpose of the service
• Contact with credentials

When you are ready to implement a more robust business continuity plan, also list:

• Risk to the business if service is unavailable
• How authentication to the service is done? (SSO, service-managed credentials database)

With that information, you can then categorize providers into three tier:

Tier 1 providers

Any outage to one of these providers has immediate and severe consequences to the business. In simple terms: total blackout and every person in the business is scrambling to find a way to come back online.

Tier 2 providers

An outage of tier 2 providers means the service runs with a severely degradated experience. The operations team is on the bridge to mitigate and solve the issue as quickly as possible but other parts of the business might still be able to operate on their regular schedule.

Tier 3 providers

An outage of tier 3 providers is annoying but the effects are not immediate nor affect all customers. The operations team can resolve those issues on their normal work schedule.

Example

It can be intimidating at first to populate Purpose of the service and Risk to the business. Fortunately for most SaaS products, these two columns of the spreadsheet are pretty standard.