Building business continuity for SaaS outages
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Building business continuity for SaaS outages: a guide for engineering leaders
Navid Khazra
Published on 12 December 2025
7 min read
Navid Khazra
Published on 12 December 2025
7 min read
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Key takeaways
The ripple effect: why a single outage matters
What downtime looks like through an engineering lens
Rethinking continuity: protect the flow of work
Where risk shows up: compliance and vendor dependence
Practical steps engineering leaders can take now
From outage to opportunity
Looking ahead: Designing continuity with your insights
FAQ: Business continuity for SaaS outages
Building continuity for SaaS outages: Rewind shares insights on how DevOps teams protect pipelines, capture workflow state, and keep shipping during vendor outages.
Editor's Note: This is a guest blog from our partners at Rewind, in collaboration with Adaptavist. Rewind specialises in SaaS backup and continuity solutions, while Adaptavist is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner helping enterprises integrate these tools into broader resilience strategies.
Key takeaways
- The recent AWS and Microsoft Azure outages were a sharp reminder: modern businesses don't just use the cloud, they run on it, and outages will halt sprints, block pipelines, and erode organisational trust.
- Organisations need "productivity continuity" that frequently captures workflow state (issues, PRs, CI history) and enables rapid, granular failover.
- For DevOps, engineering, and R&D teams, outages cause concrete failures—unmergeable PRs, mid-deploy pipeline failures, lost triage context, and automation state loss—that derail releases and increase technical debt.
- Practical mitigation: map critical SaaS dependencies, prioritise near-real-time capture of CI/issue/pipeline state, and run tabletop exercises assuming vendor unavailability.
The recent public cloud outages served as a wake-up call: modern businesses don’t just use the cloud; they run on it.
For DevOps, IT and operations leaders, that single sentence should change how you think about continuity. Outages will happen. They'll halt sprints, block pipelines, and erode trust across your organisation. The real question is whether your teams can keep making progress when an upstream vendor goes dark.
And what if a SaaS outage didn't mean "stop everything"? What if getting back to (or at least close to) business as usual was as simple as flipping a virtual switch? That's some of what the Rewind team is working on.
The ripple effect: why a single outage matters
Today’s engineering organisations depend on a tightly woven stack of SaaS tools: source control, CI/CD, issue tracking, documentation, observability and more. When a core provider has an incident, those integrations and workflows stop behaving as expected. A stalled CI server or inaccessible issue tracker doesn’t just delay work for an hour; it creates problems that cascade across the sprint, creating blockers and stalling progress.
Downtime is expensive in both dollars and momentum. Depending on which analyst you trust most, downtime from data loss costs businesses anywhere from $5,000 per minute all the way to $20,000 per minute, depending on which industry analyst you trust most. That's anywhere from more than $300,000 to $1.2 million per hour. It's not just lost revenue that contributes to that heady number.
Beyond the headline economics, outages cost teams time, create context loss, and force emergency firefighting that pulls skilled engineers off value-creating work. Uptime guarantees from vendors are necessary, but they're not sufficient for continuity.
What downtime looks like through an engineering lens
For DevOps, engineering, and R&D teams, an outage often translates to very specific, concrete problems:
- Pull requests can't merge because CI is unreachable.
- Release pipelines fail mid-deploy, creating partial states that are risky to roll forward.
- Tickets, runbooks, and historical context become unavailable, blocking triage.
- Automation rules and integrations lose state, requiring manual fixes once systems recover.
Even a short disruption can nudge a sprint off course, causing missed deadlines, delayed features, and increased technical debt. Traditional disaster recovery often focuses on servers and storage, not the SaaS workflows that keep teams productive day to day.
Rethinking continuity: protect the flow of work
Continuity for SaaS-driven engineering should protect the flow of work, not only the raw data. True resilience means shifting from “restore only” thinking to “productivity continuity,” so teams can continue making measurable progress during a vendor outage. The ideal continuity flow should consist of:
- Capture context and state (issues, PRs, CI history) frequently and independently.
- Enable rapid, granular failover so teams can continue on a mirrored environment or temporary workspace.
- Preserve automation, configs and access controls so work resumes with minimal reconfiguration.
- Keep auditable trails to meet compliance and governance needs during and after incidents.
This approach reduces the "stop everything" impact of upstream outages by letting teams continue critical activities like triage, development, and deployments—even when a vendor is unavailable.
Where risk shows up: compliance and vendor dependence
Enterprises must also consider regulatory and audit obligations. A robust continuity plan provides independent capture, immutable retention options, and clear audit trails so organisations can demonstrate compliance even through incidents.
Practical steps engineering leaders can take now
You don't need to wait for a silver-bullet product to improve resilience. Start with practical, incremental moves:
- Map your critical workflows and identify which SaaS dependencies would break them.
- Prioritise what needs near-real-time capture (CI history, issue state, pipeline configs).
- Test runbooks that assume tool unavailability. Run tabletop exercises where a core vendor is "down."
- Evaluate solutions that offer independent, frequent capture and fast selective restore or failover.
These steps reduce the blast radius of an outage and preserve delivery momentum.
From outage to opportunity
Recent cloud outages aren't anomalies—they're warnings that will continue. Resilient teams treat continuity as a design requirement, not an emergency checkbox. The organisations that win will be the ones that make continuity part of their workflows: protecting pipelines, preserving progress, and ensuring that when a vendor falters, their teams don’t.
Looking ahead: designing continuity with your insights
At Rewind, in partnership with Adaptavist, we're building continuity capabilities designed specifically for SaaS-centric engineering workflows: frequent, granular captures of repo and issue state, fast selective recovery, and tooling that preserves the context teams need to keep shipping.
Our planned Continuity features will offer a reduced-functionality version of your backed-up SaaS product during an outage. For example, if we're protecting your Jira Cloud instance, you'll be able to access a limited-functionality project management interface directly from Rewind during the outage, with ticket changes being synchronised back to Jira Cloud once service is restored.
FAQ: Business continuity for SaaS outages
How does a business continuity plan help during an outage?
A business continuity plan outlines how teams will maintain productivity when public cloud or another core service is unavailable. It helps identify critical dependencies, establish failover processes, and reduce downtime costs during cloud disruptions.
What are the biggest risks SaaS outages pose to DevOps, engineering, and R&D teams?
Outages can block code merges, break CI/CD pipelines, and cause automation failures. They lead to lost context, delayed releases, and increased technical debt—especially when continuity planning is limited to infrastructure recovery.
How can DevOps, engineering, and R&D teams maintain productivity continuity during vendor outages?
Teams should frequently capture workflow state—like issues, pull requests, and CI history—and use tools that allow rapid failover or temporary workspaces. This ensures progress continues even when primary SaaS tools are offline.
What practical steps improve SaaS business continuity today?
Map critical SaaS dependencies, prioritise near-real-time state capture, and run tabletop exercises that assume a key vendor is down. These simple steps reduce the impact and scope of future outages.
Why are uptime guarantees not enough for business continuity?
Service-level agreements only promise restoration, not uninterrupted productivity. True business continuity ensures teams can keep working through outages—not just recover afterwards.
How is Rewind helping build SaaS-focused continuity solutions?
Rewind is developing tools that capture workflow context and enable fast, selective recovery so DevOps, engineering, and R&D teams can keep shipping during outages.
How can Adaptavist help organisations implement business continuity solutions?
Adaptavist is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner specialising in DevOps, cloud migrations, and Atlassian solutions. We help enterprise teams integrate backup and recovery tools like Rewind into their broader resilience strategies—ensuring continuity solutions work seamlessly across multi-cloud environments, Atlassian toolchains, and existing DevOps workflows.
About the author
Navid Khazra, Director of Product Marketing at Rewind, focuses on building SaaS backup and continuity solutions that help organisations protect their critical workflows. Learn more at Rewind here.