You can't prevent your cloud service provider from going down, but there are ways to protect yourself Amazon’s infamous cloud outage in April brought down a number of popular websites, including foursquare and Reddit, but many of Amazon’s enterprise cloud customers were able to weather the storm without experiencing downtime. Guide to cloud management software They architected their systems for resiliency by using multiple availability zones, having hot backups in traditional data centers, or having a backup cloud provider set up and ready to go in case of a problem. Silicon Valley-based photosharing company SmugMug stayed up through the outage even as its peers failed. That was partly because it avoided the use of Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage — the particular service component that went down. But the company also spread its systems across several Amazon data centers — what Amazon calls “availability zones.” To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You’ll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in. Cloud Computing