SaaS: Too Much of a Good Thing for Retailers?
When performance issues happen — and they will — the logical question to ask is what to do next? The answer depends a lot on when and how you become aware of the issue, and who is impacted. If you're relying on a "Trust" site, that information may not be timely or actionable enough to be useful.
Employees will most likely call your service desk when internal-facing systems flake out. Managing helpdesk tickets is a costly affair, but arming your IT team with detailed information about the health of the SaaS app at issue can reduce the time to diagnose and resolve, especially if the problem is within your control. Maybe the issue is actually due to a WAN configuration change and only impacts a certain location.
External-facing SaaS apps are trickier. Customers or partners tend to go away without saying anything, making immediate awareness critical. With a proactive approach to monitoring your external-facing SaaS apps in real time, you can quickly make course corrections to mitigate interruptions. For example, in the case of an email landing page, you might reroute visitors to your Facebook page. Actionable data makes the difference.
Trust But Verify
SaaS applications can get your retail business to a more agile state. You've probably already started the journey. Realize the coverage of a service-level guarantee narrows as app adoption grows. Now is the time to start looking at performance before it tips the scale. Ask yourself whether you have the data you need to optimize what your SaaS apps support today. Get proactive.
Aaron Rudger is senior marketing manager for web performance at Keynote, a mobile and website testing and monitoring company. Aaron can be reached at aaron.rudger@keynote.com.
