As the theme tune to the classic 1984 Ghostbusters movie goes, "If there's something strange, in your neighborhood, Who ya gonna call?", I am left wondering what we'll all be singing (shouting?) when something goes wrong in our cloud world. When you've got your whole business in the cloud and there is an outage, just what happens to your bottom line? What happens to your customers? What do you do?

As the richness of our cloud-oriented world grows, this is becoming a serious consideration. We've come to rely, for example, on various web-based email systems such as Microsoft's Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Google's Gmail. Each of these have had high-profile outages in the last year, and whenever that happens, you are completely powerless to do anything.