On Tuesday December 20th, some salesforce.com users (including myself), mostly in North America, experienced intermittent access between approximately 9:30 am and 1:00 pm ET & 2:00 pm and 4:45 pm ET. The outage was explained by salesforce.com executives and commented in interested ways by Phil Wainewright on ZDNet.

This incident, and the unrelated problems recently experienced with TypePad are good reminders that when using online services, one must anticipate for possible service unavailability. So, when all your data is online, what is there to do when your online service provider goes down?

First, do not put all your eggs in one basket. Integration is good, but it also adds single points of failure that can become very disruptive. Taking this into account, I make sure to separate unstructured data (email) from structured data (relational database) by using Gmail in combination with Salesforce.com. When Gmail is down (this never hapened to me so far, knock on wood), I can still send emails from Salesforce.com. When Salesforce.com is down, a lot of my data can still be retrieved from my email archives on Gmail.

Second, backups always are a good idea. To make sure, the data backup system of top-tier online service providers such as Gmail or Salesforce.com will always beat any personal backup system one could put in place with reasonable resources. Therefore the issue is not so much about losing data forever, but rather about not getting access to data at this crucial moment, and good old Murphy will make sure that this very rare outage will happen at the worst possible time. In order to deal with such occurrences, I do monthly backups of all Salesforce.com data and store backup files on a couple of servers that I can get access to through VPN access. At the time of writing, I am still trying to figure out an efficient way of backing up emails. Forwarding all incoming emails to a Yahoo! Mail account seems to be the best answer I found so far, but I have yet to implement it.

Third, learn how to work offline. Once all contacts and appointments are synchronized on your mobile phone or BlackBerry device and time-sensitive documents have been printed out for convenient reading during a plane ride, not much more is needed for a productive work session of a couple hours. After that, take a break, get some food, chat with your buddy, and it is very likely that your much beloved service will be back online. And in the best cases, you will have won a week worth of free service, as was the case following the recent TypePad outage. I just wish that Salesforce.com was that generous.