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I thought Fortune 500 companies (at least the enterprise companies I dealt with) that had checklists for their SAAS vendors that had to check off things like Di

I thought Fortune 500 companies (at least the enterprise companies I dealt with) that had checklists for their SAAS vendors that had to check off things like Disaster Recovery Readiness, etc. At the very least this company learned a hard lesson about Disaster Recovery best practices. Hopefully all the up and coming companies reading this story learns as well. Also please remember that a backup that isn't tested IS NOT A BACKUP! I've been in so many situations where backups were corrupted, so part of the disaster recovery is to test the backups and make sure you can really recover. There are a million different scenarios where their data could be lost and it not be Digital Ocean's fault. It's the company's responsibility to have protected their customers from this. I worked at a company with no real Disaster Recovery plan. I was told that "we can get the servers up and running within 18 hrs if we had an outage", which not only was absurdly slow but probably an underestimate. Only by the grace of God did we not suffer a real outage but if we did, it was totally the VP's fault for not addressing my concerns.

the8472 7y ago
Such checklists exist, but not all services are of equal importance to the customer, so they are not vetted in equal detail. Often the supplier has to fill out the checklist themselves. > do you have backups? Manager: [X] > are they offsite? Dev: cloud provider docs say so Manager: [X] Customer: Great, you won the bid.
korethr 7y ago
My personal experience such questionnaires is that the questions can be vague, redundant, or not even really ask anything at all. But, even when the questions are concise and precise, it's all to easy to "word smith" an answer that seems to give the desired answer without every actually saying anything. And the person administering said checklist may not even know enough about what the checklist is checking to vet the answers.

the8472 7y ago

Such checklists exist, but not all services are of equal importance to the customer, so they are not vetted in equal detail. Often the supplier has to fill out the checklist themselves. > do you have backups? Manager: [X] > are they offsite? Dev: cloud provider docs say so Manager: [X] Customer: Great, you won the bid.

korethr 7y ago

My personal experience such questionnaires is that the questions can be vague, redundant, or not even really ask anything at all. But, even when the questions are concise and precise, it's all to easy to "word smith" an answer that seems to give the desired answer without every actually saying anything. And the person administering said checklist may not even know enough about what the checklist is checking to vet the answers.