This post tackles the real question: When disaster strikes, who is actually responsible for getting you back online? And what can you do—before the outage—to ensure continuity across environments you don’t fully control?

🏗️ Understanding the Shared Responsibility Model

In cloud environments, responsibility is divided between the provider and the customer:

• IaaS (e.g., AWS, Azure): You manage OS, apps, data, IAM, backups; the provider manages hardware, network, hypervisor
• PaaS: You manage data and logic; the provider manages runtime, scaling, and middleware
• SaaS: You manage access, data configuration, and usage; the provider manages everything else—but outages still affect you

Many BC/DR plans fail because teams assume the provider is handling continuity. They’re not—not at your level.

🔎 Key Vendor Risk and Continuity Questions

• 📍 Where does our data live? (Geo-redundancy, compliance zones, failover regions)
• 🔒 What happens if the provider is breached? (Can you isolate, retrieve, or purge your data?)
• 📉 What is their real-world RTO/RPO? (Not just the SLA—but observed performance)
• 🔌 What if the vendor disappears? (Exit plans, data portability, escrow mechanisms)
• 🧱 Are we dependent on a single provider’s region or identity stack? (e.g., AzureAD, Okta, AWS us-east-1)

🔁 SaaS Continuity Is Still Your Responsibility

• Email continuity: Can staff still communicate during a Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace outage?
• CRM continuity: What happens if Salesforce or HubSpot is down during a sales cycle?
• Auth continuity: Does your SSO provider have a failover option or offline mode?
• Backup strategy: Do you control a copy of your critical SaaS data? Is it test-restorable?

You can’t outsource accountability—even if you outsource infrastructure.

📊 Mapping Dependencies to Your BCP

• 🗺️ Create a SaaS and cloud dependency map: List critical apps, providers, and which business processes rely on them
• 🛠️ Assess each for: Availability guarantees, data portability, region redundancy, offline access
• 🧩 Cross-reference with DR testing: Include vendor failure simulations in your tabletop exercises

The most dangerous failure mode? A critical third-party that no one realized was critical—until it went dark.

🧠 Modern Continuity Architecture Patterns

• Multi-region architecture: Design for regional failover in cloud-native applications
• Multi-cloud strategies: Use cloud-agnostic tooling or hybrid cloud DR for high-impact systems
• SaaS data extraction: Use third-party backup tools to pull key data into secure archives
• Identity fallbacks: Design MFA/SSO fallback workflows for key internal access during IDaaS outages

📣 Final Thought

Continuity isn’t just what happens inside your data center or VPC. It’s what happens when your identity provider fails, your CRM goes offline, or your third-party payroll vendor goes dark before a Friday payday. Cloud and SaaS may simplify operations—but they complicate continuity.

Need help mapping dependencies, reviewing vendor DR posture, or designing cloud-native continuity? Let’s talk.