The sales pitch for the cloud is like a travel brochure, or a military recruiting speech. They tell you all of the features and benefits--cost-effective, scalable, resilient--but fail to mention the down sides like the fact that if the cloud data center is offline, so is your business.

So, does that mean that the cloud is just too risky, and that you should avoid using cloud servers or storage? No. Not at all. There are still benefits to using cloud-based servers and storage, but the cloud has to be treated like any other technology your company relies on.

CEO Aaron Levie commented, "At Box, we run our site from multiple data centers, so in the event of an outage we're still able to successfully serve the application and data to our customers without interruption."

Obviously, Amazon has to determine the root cause and has some explaining to do to the affected customers. But, rather than simply embracing the cloud and entrusting your business-critical processing and data to it, you need to have a plan in place for situations like the Amazon outage. Don't use cloud services unless you can adequately answer the question "what happens to my business if the cloud service in unavailable?"

SmugMug managed to avoid being affected by the Amazon outage, and CEO Dan MacAskill , "Any of our instances, or any group of instances in an AZ (Availability Zone), can be "shot in the head" and our system will recover (with some caveats - but they're known, understood, and tested)."