[altacc]

In some architectures it can be, which is a risk. A while ago I was in a day long kick off for a project to replatform a division of a large company, with Salesforce at the core. As it happens, one of the other division's Saleforce instance was down the whole day, bringing down everything. Internal systems, web, sales... everything broken.

We listened to the lesson and the architecture we designed ended up not having Salesforce as a dependency for any critical or money producing customer facing functionality.

We used Alteryx as a ETL tool to keep Salesforce in sync in almost real time. The customer facing sites and services ran off their independent databases. This also meant that the developers working on that didn't need to know the details about how Salesforce worked, we just mapped Salesforce data to their database.