One of the perils of the cloud computing age is the fact that, if the cloud goes down, you’ve got nothing.  As it turns out, even the largest of companies is kind of at the mercy of nature.  For example, Amazon.com runs a massive cloud computing operation out of their server farm in Virginia.  When summer storms knocked out the power, Amazon’s cloud computing service went down with it.

Amazon Web Services provides the backbones for hundreds of companies, from Unilever and Fox Entertainment to 187 different government agencies.  When that went down, well… it was pretty bad for all involved.  That’s the nature of server storage, and since the entire internet runs off servers stored at various locations, it’s a risk everyone takes.  That said, big companies need reliability in their web services and, unlike individual users, they may not be backing things up locally since they pay Amazon to do that for them.

Everything’s going cloud.  Here’s the question:  do you trust the cloud?  Personally, as long as I keep regular backups and the cloud company is willing to restore things if and when there is an outage, I’m fine.