The nature of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications means that there is not a single silver bullet or method for protecting all SaaS applications. Instead, businesses must look at their SaaS tools as a portfolio of different platforms, each with their own risk profiles. Additionally, modern SaaS tools are API-driven and allow for composability to extend functionality and customize the way that businesses use the tools. Composability is a superpower for businesses, but it introduces a serious load of kryptonite in the form of complexity.

While the traditional process of assessing risk and assigning a business impact analysis (BIA) for each platform is still sound practice, the added integration of SaaS applications with other tools and capabilities means that the opportunity for a system outage to affect other unrelated functions is very high. Building knowledge about SaaS platforms and the impacts of their failure can benefit from concepts in chaos engineering about testing failure scenarios. This reports highlights best practices from leading enterprises, such as integrating failure simulations and tabletops into the BIA process, which can help find potential impacts that must be mitigated against.

To learn about this and other aspects of building a SaaS resilience strategy, read How To Create A SaaS Application Resilience Strategy.