SaaS Escrow services

AccessAssure an introduction

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This agreement is for use where there are three parties involved in the SaaS service – a Software Vendor (Licensor) and a Software User (Licensee) and a third party hosting provider. It protects all parties against “blank screen” syndrome and loss of service.

 

Prime Assure Escrow Agreement

This agreement is part of business continuity planning and is for use solely by a Software Vendor (Licensor) or third party hosting provider where they work together to provide a service to Software Users, but ultimately one party is the Prime Contractor. The Prime Contractor needs to protect itself and its reputation with its customers for loss of their data and against potentially unlimited liability in this regard should its sub-contractor fail to provide the necessary sub – contractor services.

Why is SaaS Escrow such an essential and business critical product?

As a G-Cloud supplier ourselves, we are in touch with best practice procurement in the local and central government arena. The government agenda to move towards shared services and cloud services to maximize cost efficiencies is not without its challenges – primarily the security of data, the recognition that traditional escrow agreements do not provide the security required for this type of service provision and the increased user awareness of “blank screen” syndrome.

In this increasingly sophisticated marketplace, reputable Software Vendors (Licensors) have to reassess their escrow agreements and their business continuity practices to protect both themselves and their Software Users (Licensees). This ensures that these issues do not prevent sales of cost effective Software Vendor SaaS services.

The obvious problem with SaaS services is that the Software user (Licensee) does not hold any source code or data on their own servers. This means that if either the Software Vendor (Licensor) or its hosting provider go into liquidation, The Software User (Licensee) could find its business critical data is not available and they are simply staring at a blank screen one morning. In this situation, where the data is business critical or sensitive, a Software User could literally be out of business in a matter of days. The obvious option – to back up data to an Escrow Agent on a daily basis – is simply not an affordable option for most Software Users (Licensees).

Our legal team have developed a “new breed” SaaS escrow agreement to tackle this problem to give legal comfort and protection to Software Vendors and Software Users.