At the end of last year I went on a long voyage, in fact to the other side of the world, to work at IntraLinks’ Sydney Office. I left my two children who are both under five and my partner for two weeks. Naturally I was concerned for their welfare and knew I would miss them but what surprised me was that I was also very worried that I had yet to create, let alone update my last will and testament. What financial mess would I leave behind if my plane crashed? What was certain was that the tax man would be inordinately happy about my lack of financial housekeeping and my family would be left devastated. The main question that this made me ask myself though was not why have I been so remiss, but why is it that we have to be scheduled on a flight to make us focus on what should have been done an age ago.

I recently spoke at the Argyle Corporate Counsel Leadership Forum in Chicago, Illinois. It was a great opportunity to meet counsel from many different businesses, and share some very interesting ideas.

While the Galleon news has primarily faded into the backdrop of the media landscape, its impact continues to pervade the financial services industry in myriad ways from a heightened focus on compliance to an increased spotlight on insider trading and the exchange of critical, sensitive and material non-public information. This single breach clearly illustrates the enormous impact one single employee can have on ruining the trust a company has spent so many years building with its clients, the financial services industry and its employees. Despite this new level of appreciation, three months later, what has Galleon truly taught us? IntraLinks deals with confidential business information by design, therefore making security our top priority when it comes to managing our technology and personnel. It’s all about keeping the trust we’ve spent more than 12 years building with our customers, including those in the financial services community, and with our employees. It is our duty to safeguard our clients’ most valuable asset — their information. Our business is based on earning and maintaining our customers’ trust in managing their critical, sensitive business information.

I was recently reading a Gartner report on market trends in Team and Social Software by Tom Eid and Bianca Francesca Granetto. (The full June 2009 report, called "Market Trends: Web Conferencing, Teaming and Social Software," is available for purchase from Gartner.) The report is very insightful in pointing out "the convergence in technologies and usage across unified communications, Web 2.0, team collaboration and web conferencing."

Service’s gold standard
The gold standard for service availability in the olden days was the “dial tone.” You could pick up the phone and you always knew that familiar tone would be there to greet you. Managing mission-critical software services needs a similar gold standard. With clients utilizing SaaS for critical information exchange across multiple processes and time zones, the expectation is for SaaS platforms to always be available and always performing. Even scheduled downtime for upgrades can be troublesome for business-critical activities.

This standard for platform availability is indeed very much out of the reach of most commercial SaaS platforms today. Some of the challenges are due to lack of rigor in software design and testing, while others have to do with lack of operational environments which are meant for high-availability services.

What is high availability and how do we measure it?
Before we delve into how to plan service management for highly available SaaS platforms, it is important to understand how to best measure availability. We also need to set the expectations for various platform components to deliver high availability service.