This week we heard of Microsoft's Office 365 cloud service suffering an outage, and while the problem appears limited to Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) North American data centers, the downtime no doubt resulted in real business disruption for affected users.

Coming so soon after the 365's late June launch, this incident no doubt caused jitters among those considering moving services to the cloud.

Microsoft is not alone in its brush with downtime either: Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) was left red-faced following a Gmail outage triggered by a software update bug in May, while Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) experienced a prolonged outage in April.

Cloud advantages

In the wake of such well-publicized downtime, there are many critical and sarcastic comments about the inferiority of cloud services. Reading through some the responses to ZDNet's report here, I chanced on a response to a snarky remark condemning the use of cloud for a "mission critical app." A commenter named bitcrazed recounted the struggles of a client whose eight-year-old Exchange 2003 server was crashing on a weekly basis. The client had four HDD failures over the intervening years, with upgrades to larger HDDs also done on another three occasions--apparently "their average availability during the last 12 months was 68.8% per month."

It's easy to see how some businesses that are stuck with aging machines and unable to pony up for new ones may find a small monthly fee attractive. And in the case of the anecdote above, they instantly benefit from increased availability.

Feeling of helplessness

Yet there is also no denying that many of the prominent cloud outages resulted in less-than-satisfactory updates afterwards. Some affected users in this instance have complained that service requests to Microsoft were not getting through, possibly knocked offline by the same outage, ironically.

Those who've followed recent outages from Amazon Web Services and Google might notice that their updates were less than helpful, too, in terms of determining exactly when affected users could expect their services restored.

The result is lots of waiting, as well as a feeling of helplessness, and likely anger, for businesses that did not have a contingency plan in place.

Consider the cloud objectively

What is clear from these scenarios is that businesses need to weigh the pros and cons when considering the cloud. There are obvious advantages to moving to the cloud in some situations, though businesses should establish proper continuity plans for critical functions. Don't blindly follow the crowd into the cloud, but don't blindly reject it either.

Whether your company has taken a step into the cloud or decided against it, I would like to hear your take. Drop me an email or add a comment below. - Paul Mah  (Twitter @paulmah)