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The onrush of SaaS, cloud, or as I prefer to call it, Internet-based applications is likely to be set back following this month's Web outages at Sage and Intuit. But any setback is only temporary, although we're stuck with awful terms like SaaS and cloud computing. Still the problems were severe for affected customers. In both cases, Internet sites and services were down for long periods, long if you're trying to run a business via such applications. Sage systems were down for 22 hours and there have been spotty problems since. Most Intuit applications and Web pages were down for roughly 24 hours.

In Sage's case, Accpaconline was down as were corporate email and order-entry systems. For Intuit customers, it was even worse. Credit-card processing, payroll and QuickBooks email were offline, representing some of the most necessary everyday functions used to run small business and thousands of them found their operations suddenly frozen.

It was no vacation for larger companies. But many small operations lack the resources to deal with IT problems in the first place. They signed on, figuring this was like the electric light or telephone or better, perhaps forgetting there are times these also fail. Somehow this seems worse. However, that is probably because most people have been through a power company failures; most haven't had their SaaS supplier go down for long periods.

But part of the solution is the same as when an approaching storm threatens utility operations. Be prepared ahead of time. Keep calculators, blank checks, envelopes and stamps on hand. Things may just have to be mailed or overnighted.

Some observers advice choosing a vendor with multiple data centers as back up. That requires active talks with the vendor when a user is considering a purchase, and scrutinizing vendor Web sites carefully to see what claims they make about backup and redundant systems.

But above all, the responsibility lies with vendors to both provide security and communicate what to do in case of a problem. That type of information has to be provided before systems go dark. It's like fire safety: people in an office need to know where the fire exits are before smoke starts rolling in.

Planning won't eliminate all pain. But if both users and vendors spell out their plans in advance; the pain probably won't be as bad.

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