Last Thursday, Amazon Web Services (U.S. East data center in Virginia which is one of its oldest and largest data centers) experienced a major outage which impacted some large name brand internet sites for several hours.

As expected competitors were quick to jump on social media sites to announce that their services remained available and some enterprise pessimists may use this to justify not moving some of their enterprise services to the cloud. The reality is that outages happen whether your apps run in the cloud or your own datacenter. The reason AWS outages get more air time is because of the incredible number of services now dependent on Amazon’s Web Services. AWS is no more likely to go down than any of its major competitors.

The important message here is to ensure you have redundancy and High Availability built into your enterprise architecture from the start. Determine your tolerance for downtime and design accordingly.