"I think there is ," said Justin Alexander, who heads strategic research and development at Hyland Software, an enterprise content management software firm, referring to both Amazon and its customers.

"Clearly, Amazon needs to take accountability for their services. But at the same time there were a variety of customers who were using the EC2 platform that did not suffer any period of unavailability," said Alexander, citing their disaster recovery plans.

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 .

in Computerworld's Cloud Computing Topic Center.