Analyst: Cloud SLAs are "mediocre" at best

The Altium example

Sydney-based software company Altium claims to be the first company in the world to use Salesforce.com as a business platform, and not simply a CRM tool.

By replacing on-premise systems with Salesforce.com's platform, Amazon's S3 and Google Apps, Altium has cut back from 55 on-premise servers to 30.

The company's CIO Alan Perkins planned to use only a "half dozen" servers eventually.

With its 15 worldwide offices, as well as clients, reliant on Altium's IT systems, Perkins said it had "mitigation procedures" in place in case of disruption.

Altium performed periodic downloads of its Salesforce.com data for both risk mitigation and business intelligence purposes.

Because a majority of its business is in China, the company also was particularly concerned with its use of Google Apps there, and performs periodic backups of its Google Docs and Gmail data.

"Outages are inevitable in anything computing related, we have a number of mitigation procedures if cloud services go down," Perkins told iTnews.

"Occasionally, they [cloud services] do go down for five to 15 minutes, and it could be very damaging for us because our customers rely on our systems," he said.