"Have you ever been at an airport when a flight is canceled?" he says, as an analogy. "Everyone's in an immediate rush to get to the customer service desk and they wait in line. Then there are other folks, who just call their travel agent directly and the problem is taken care of. We're that travel agent that directs your traffic where it needs to go." Riverbed Stingray immediately and automatically redirects traffic over a dedicated network, avoiding the bottlenecks created in the AWS environment. Like the RightScale option, there are various levels of service that customers can choose from, ranging in price depending on how fault tolerant the system is.

As Hilgendorf says, and Dave agrees: It's a cost-benefit analysis for the business. "There are some apps where it's OK if it does down for an hour a month," Dave says. "But there are tons of apps that can't afford that."

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.