While Amazon's AZs do offer some level of redundancy for your cloud services, the Amazon outage proved that it is possible for multiple AZs to be impacted at once, making that solution inadequate in some situations. An alternative approach would be to contract cloud services from multiple vendors and implement your own redundancy to protect your business from any one cloud service outage.

Levie summed up, though, with a reminder for those who might be gun-shy about the cloud as a result of the Amazon outage. "It's also important to keep in mind that the overall uptime of cloud services greatly outperforms on-premise infrastructure in the case of vendors like Google, Salesforce and Box, freeing up IT departments to focus on strategic initiatives rather than maintenance."

So, the cloud is imperfect, but if you and treat the cloud as you would any other server or data storage on your network, there is no reason your business can't safely enjoy the benefits the cloud has to offer.