SMBs and startups are often the first to adopt SaaS products. As these customers become more complex and larger, and you add more organizations to your network, scaling your infrastructure is critical for enterprise success.Here are four ways to improve your company's infrastructure so that you can support and grow your biggest customers.Your customers' security and reliability requirements should be addressedYou are likely to have very sensitive customer data if you're building SaaS. No matter what you build, you are a threat vector to attacks on customers. Security is vital for all customers. However, the stakes are higher as the customer's reach grows.It is crucial to create infrastructure, products, and processes that meet your customers' growing security and reliability requirements. This includes your moral and ethical obligation to ensure that your systems and practices exceed all claims you make to security and reliability for your customers.These are the security and reliability requirements that large customers often ask for:Customers expect uptime SLAs if you build SaaS. Customers who use your software for mission-critical purposes will expect formal SLAs that guarantee 99.9% uptime. You must be confident about your uptime as you build product layers and infrastructure. It is important to be able to measure uptime per customer so that you can determine if you are meeting your contractual obligations.Although it can be difficult to prioritize the requests of your largest customers, you will find that their collective feedback will help guide your product roadmap in the right direction.Your platform's current status: Larger customers will expect to be able to view historical uptime as well as real-time visibility into incidents and events. This visibility will help you to grow and become more skilled, and it will also allow for greater collaboration between your customer operations teams and infrastructure teams. This collaboration is worth investing in as it gives you insight into customers who are experiencing a degradation in your service. It also allows you to communicate what you have found and your ETA.Backups: Customers will have different expectations about backups. Not only should they expect to be able to retrieve the entire application in a reasonable time, but also regarding backup frequency, backup location, and data retention (e.g. are you keeping the data for too long?) You can stay ahead of these questions by planning for future flexibility in backup management when you are developing your backup strategy.
