If there were any IT professionals out there who weren’t ready to make a commitment to the cloud, Amazon’s recent public cloud outage wasn’t much reassurance.

According to one long-time Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) customer, cloud customers need to take more responsibility of their own uptime.

"Downtime is lost revenue, and every level of the company needs to take responsibility for emergency preparedness," said Colin Dean, president of the Pittsburgh LAN Coalition, a group that organizes video gaming events. "Any time a company decides to use a cloud service, they absolutely must assess the risk an outage poses to their business.”

The Pittsburgh LAN Coalition’s critical systems are set up to fall back on local disks or to another cloud service.

Amazon’s most recent outage took down a single Availability Zone in Amazon’s data center in northern Virginia, which supports the US-EAST-1 regiion. The outage, which was triggered by a power failure, affected a disproportionate number of customers because that data center is AWS’s largest and oldest.

"This is a rehash of earlier outages in terms of the fallout … it's loud and sometimes histrionic, but ultimately, [it’s] not going to make a dent in either Amazon's reputation or their customer uptake," said Carl Brooks, analyst for infrastructure and cloud computing at Tier1 Research, a division of New York City-based 451 Research LLC."Outages are going to happen ... that said, it will serve to reinforce the stereotypes of cloud computing among the irredentist enterprise faction that is feeling threatened by the trends toward external IT services.”

Failures like those at AWS, as well as Microsoft's (News - Alert) Windows Azure outage in February, continue to provide cover for some IT managers opposed to risking processing and data to the cloud.

For instances like Amazon’s outage, companies need to keep their customer relationship management (CRM) solutions in mind. Soffront, a provider of an integrated CRM suite spanning sales, marketing, service and operations, was one of the first cloud-based CRM providers beginning seven years ago and has many satisfied cloud CRM customers.

Its cloud computing on-demand service offers capabilities that are not usually available with hosted applications, including unmatched breadth and depth of features, and customization. Soffront Hosted ASP provides the flexibility of low up-front costs and an easy migration path to an on-premise Soffront CRM solution. It provides complete sales, marketing and service features plus order management, customer analytics and embedded best practices.

Want to learn more about cloud communications? Then be sure to attend the Cloud Communications Expo, collocated with ITEXPO West 2012 taking place Oct 2-5, in Austin, TX. The Cloud Communications Expo will address the growing need of businesses to integrate and leverage cloud based communications applications, process enhancement techniques, and network based communications interfaces and architectures. For more information on registering for the Cloud Communications Expo click here.

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