And if the contract value you’re considering
is substantial enough, or significant enough to your business, get
your attorney and a qualified computer consultant involved in
reviewing the ASP’s contract and proposal.
Because of the high risk of financial distress,
plan from the outset that your ASP will go out of business someday.
Then decide what sorts of daily controls and
procedures you’ll put into place to protect your company’s data
and minimize downtime when your hosted application no longer is
available.
Also, it’s not enough just to check customer
references. Don’t forget to ask how daily maintenance and support
tasks are handled. Inquire about basic data backup and restoration
procedures, power protection, security and firewalls, virus
protection and Internet backbone redundancy.
Software Services Action Items
Who owns the ASP and what's their current
financial condition? Is it a publicly held firm that you can
monitor, or is it a closely held company?
What provisions are in place to protect
your data and mitigate downtime, if the ASP goes out of business?
Can you get the source code for the
outsourced application placed in escrow, so that you can migrate the
application to another ASP or ISP in the event that the ASP files
for bankruptcy and liquidation?
Will you have the ability to backup or
export your hosted data from your hosted application to a folder on
your office's LAN server? Can this be automated and scheduled for at
least once a day?
How does the ASP back up your data?
Do you have the ability to back up data
from your office whenever you want? Is the data backup in a format
that could be readily imported into another database management
program?
What kind of service level agreement (SLA)
does the ASP offer to guarantee uptime? Are there financial
penalties tied to non-performance?
Have you reviewed your ASP's disaster
recovery plan?
Would your hosted application run on a
dedicated or shared server?
If the application will be hosted on a
shared server, how many other companies share the same server?
What kind of bandwidth and bandwidth
redundancy is in place?
How are installation, support and
maintenance handled for the hosted application?
Will you need any special hardware or
software to run the hosted application, beyond a Web browser and
Internet access account?
