One of CIOs' biggest concerns about the infrastructure-as-a-service model has been the loss of control over assets and management that enterprises might experience upon moving into a multi-tenant environment. While analysts and early adopters of infrastructure-as-a-service offerings have argued that such apprehension is rooted more in fear than fact, Amazon's recent public data center debacle has given everyone good reason to question the reliability of the public cloud.

The two-day outage may not slow the long-term growth of cloud computing significantly, but it should cause IT decision makers to take pause. Before rushing into any new cloud infrastructure deal, there are a number of steps to take to mitigate the risk of infrastructure-as-a-service failure, including planning to fail.

Develop detailed cloud breakdown scenarios and perform recovery run-throughs. "Put your risk-mitigation strategy firmly in place before moving into the cloud environment," says Phil Fersht, founder of outsourcing analyst firm HfS Research.

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