That doesn't require a lot of technology to accomplish, but Diesel Direct can't accomplish anything if its minimal IT infrastructure is offline for any length of time.

Abrams, worried about storms taking out his business as well as the power, didn't know what technical solution he wanted until Callow "described for him what an enterprise infrastructure looked like," Callow says.

"They didn't need one, didn't want one, but they did want the security, the reliability of a redundant IT infrastructure," he says. "The most effective way to get that at the lowest possible cost is the cloud.

Diesel Direct hired , a hosting provider that not only offers cloud services, it offers a range of alternatives in each of three categories--private, virtual private and public cloud. (Virtual private clouds run in shared-resource facilities like regular clouds, but encrypt the data in place and in motion and keep each customer's data separated in storage, servers and networks so they overlap as little as possible.)