Amazon's Cloud Computing Troubles

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/technology/23cloud.html

Just this past Thursday, Amazon's cloud computing service experienced technical difficulties which resulted in many companies that depended on the service to experience outages in their own systems. However, there was a great disparity between what larger firms experienced and what smaller start-up firms experienced in response to the technical difficulties at Amazon. While larger, more able, firms were able to invest larger sums of money on backup and recovery services provided by Amazon, smaller firms who did not have as extensive backup plans were left feeling the full-blown effects of the outage. For example, firms like Netflix, who have invested a lot in Amazon's "insurance" systems to backup crucial data like "customer movie queues, search tools and the like," smaller companies who were unable or unwilling to fork out the larger investment in increased security faced effects like downed websites and inaccessible data.
The whole experience really exemplifies and calls into the question the speed at which current companies are rushing to back cloud computing. It is certainly a new field, but at the same time, is also growing at an enormous rate, with many big name firms (and huge numbers of small start-ups) utilizing cloud computing services like those offered by Amazon. Is cloud computing safe? Should we trust it? One data center specialist claimed that technical difficulties like the one experienced by Amazon are analogous to airplane crashes - while they are certainly catastrophic, the chances of them happening are rare, and air travel is still statistically much safer than automobile travel. Thus, though crashes like this may happen with big cloud computing firms like Amazon, the chances of significant damage are less than the chances of firms keeping track of their own individual data centers.