To add insult to injuries, The Register reports on the confusion many customers are experiencing regarding their service level agreements post-downtime. Though the EC2 SLA states that users can receive credits if the service’s annual uptime percentage falls below 99.95%, many are finding that they fall through the loopholes in the fine print. As The Register reports, “[T]his only applies to users who have spread their applications across multiple ‘availability zones’ – subsections of Amazon’s regional services designed not to fail at the same time.” In other words, if your data isn’t spread across the EC2 service, and thus more downtime-proof, you most likely won’t be receiving a credit anytime soon. For those companies that did read the fine print and planned for disaster from day one, there was significantly less damage.

Whether you’re a cloud supporter or an anti-cloudie, you probably have an opinion on Amazon’s EC2 fiasco this past week. Bloggers around IT Knowledge Exchange took this opportunity to calm frightened users and learn valuable lessons. Take a look:

• TechStop’s Joshua Wood gave a quick rundown of what the outage meant for users and why Amazon’s Cloud Outage isn’t that big of a deal.
• Tom Nolle of Uncommon Wisdom thinks that cloud views need to get realistic.
• Storage Channel Pipeline’s Eric Slack teaches a valuable lesson to those concerned about preparing for cloud outages: Add a second provider.
• Always the voice of reason and optimism amidst cloud doubt, Ron Miller of View From Above chides cloud haters who jumped at the Amazon EC2 fiasco.
• Editor Michael Morisy wondered, in the wake of Amazon, iPhone and Dropbox, is there a new normal?

Also see IT forum questions on Cloud Computing.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

David Linthicum’s points are all valid and horribly timed:

The core issue is one of control and fear of the unknown. Although you’d think that many in IT would be innovative and fast-moving, I’ve found that most are in fact very conservative, risk-averse tactical thinkers. Cloud computing means loss of control, potential for risk, and an aggressive strategic shift.

There does need to be a balance between leveraging new technology willy-nilly without thinking about issues like security and lock-in versus digging in your heels. I hope that both business and IT find the balance. Otherwise, at least a few enterprises will find that the benefits of cloud computing have passed them by.

In the end, it’s a matter of risk management, not risk aversion and certainly not cloud religion. For more smart perspectives, take a look at the last post’s comments which pretty much nail it from both sides (including one from ITKnowledgeExchange’s very own Eric Hansen).

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Highest profile, of course, was Amazon’s EC2 outage that took out sites like Reddit, FourSquare and, according to one forum poster, cardiac monitoring tools. Lives, then, might literally have been at stake.

In another cloud/consumer blow, Dropbox updated its terms of service, making explicit its willingness to turn your data, hosted on their servers, over to the authorities. Not surprising, but another chip of control taken away from the data owner.

And finally, it was made public that the iPhone is tracking your every move, leading to spooky maps that, in some cases, go back years and which could potentially be used against their owners in legal matters.

I wish I felt gleefully vindicated, but the truth is that these are minor setbacks in a much larger trend, and it’s time to take a careful reassessment of what the new normal is in a world where data policies and even uptime are largely dictated by consumer companies such as Amazon, Apple and even small web startups that might be here one day, gone the next.

• Downtime doesn’t always equal disaster. There’s a great scene in the Social Network where Jesse Eisenberg channeling Mark Zuckerberg yells that Facebook can never go down. In reality, Facebook does occasionally (but very rarely) go down, as does most every service. I’ve even used some web services that keep something sadly close to regular business hours, with planned downtime for most of the evening every single night. The reality is that for most web services, the golden 5 Nines of uptime is simply not worth the extra cost.
• The benefits are real. Consumerized IT, whether it’s smarter smart phones, more productive communication, more collaborative work, or any other of a thousand changes, has brought real benefits that decades of top-down budget-driven initiatives have failed to deliver.
• The risks are real. See above, but also see the very real compliance risks, data leakage risks, and more.