How to Avoid Getting Amazon-ed

5. Reexamine your sourcing strategy. IT leaders have embraced multi-sourcing, nevertheless that model can make cloud continuity confusing. "The domino-effect ramifications of an outage are very complex to manage and resolve," says Fersht. For instance, as more services get built on top of cloud computing infrastructures, a seemingly isolated outage can have a domino effect, taking down many services or an entire application environment, he adds.

6. Don't be cheap. The ROI of redundancy investments skyrockets in cloud collapse scenarios. Many of the companies affected by Amazon's failure could not—or would not—pay to run parallel systems in the cloud. Major Amazon Web Services customer Netflix, in exchange, says it experienced no issues because its cloud computing model assumed one of the data centers in Amazon's four regions would go down. The company had "taken full advantage of Amazon Web Services' redundant cloud architecture," a Netflix spokesperson told The New York Times.

Critical data should be replicated across multiple availability zones and backed up or live replicated across regions; active servers should be distributed geographically, and there should be enough active capacity to shift locations should one data center implode, advises Thorsten Von Eicken, CTO and co-founder of cloud management vendor RightScale. "Clearly all this has costs, so each business needs to determine which costs are justified for each service being offered," he adds.