Bluelock also has flat predictable, pricing -- unlike the variable pricing Amazon charges, said Hayes, who noted that Consona will continue to have some customer services on Amazon run by a business group.

Dan Schoenbaum, chief business development officer and cloud evangelist for Tripwire, an IT security and compliance services firm, said the outage "may seriously impact the adoption rate of cloud among business users."

There remains a lot of interest in cloud services, particularly from venture capital backers that require start-ups to use them instead of investing in hardware. But to combat broader uncertainties, Schoenbaum expects cloud providers will have to offer up greater assurances about their services and raise the bar on what they provide.

WorkXpress's LaPlante said the outage will likely force Amazon to build out its infrastructure to prevent similar outages in the future. "The sad irony is that Amazon will emerge from this much better," he said.

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .