Moving to the cloud is not an automatic disaster recovery plan. Planning is required. While cloud services can improve availability, they can also result in outages that affect a large swath of businesses. The recent Amazon EC2 outage in North America is proof of the dangers.

In Aquent's case, its technology provider Distributed Logic created a multi-master replication system, so that Aquent's cloud infrastructure could be continuously updated amongst all three of its current zones in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The benefit of this infrastructure design became evidence during a recent outage. While Aquent was not affected by the North American Amazon outage, its infrastructure allowed it to avoid a 12-hour Amazon outage in Ireland that took the company's application server down in March, 2011. The company was able to point its European workers to the North American server while it quickly rebuilt the European server.

"Without the replicated data, we still would have been able to recover, but in the meantime, our users is Europe would have been without a system," says Aquent's Hunter. "So what we gained was availability."