Haugan's view, which stems not just from Amazon's outage alone, is that "cloud services need some more maturing and a much more hardened infrastructure and security model prior to our adoption."

One company that has been using some of Amazon's services is Consona Corp., a CRM and ERP provider. Kristen Hayes, director of global information systems for Consona said she still doesn't know what's behind the outage. "The most frustrating thing about it is either they (Amazon) are still in the dark about what's going on, or they are just keeping us in the dark about what's going on, but it's costing us money," said Hayes.

She said communications from Amazon about the outage have not been good.

Even before the outage, Consona was moving more of its services away from Amazon to either Bluelock, a cloud infrastructure as a service provider, or to its own internal data center. One reason for that is Bluelock's support of VMware. (Consona has VMware expertise in-house; Amazon doesn't use VMware.)

Using VMware's vCloud Connector, for instance, Hayes said she can manage her Bluelock environments via her IT shop. "It's just as though they are sitting in my data center," she said.