Which item must be examined in detail when evaluating the risks associated with a new...

When evaluating the risks of a new Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, the historical availability of services must be examined in detail. Managing Cloud principles explain that availability is a critical risk factor because customers rely entirely on the provider to deliver uninterrupted access to applications and data.

Reviewing historical uptime, outage frequency, and incident response performance provides insight into the provider’s operational maturity and resilience. Past availability metrics help organizations assess whether the SaaS provider can meet business continuity, disaster recovery, and service level expectations.

The other options represent security controls or operational activities but are not primary risk indicators during SaaS evaluation. Administrative account usage and multi-factor authentication relate to access controls, while patching is managed by the provider in SaaS environments. Therefore, historical availability is the most relevant item to assess.