A lot of startups and even medium sized businesses that run online, subscription applications would not have been viable just 10 years ago. This is because the cost of computer hardware and network hardware and infrastructure personnel to run a large online business was cost prohibitive even a few years ago. Cloud computing has changed much of that and Amazon has really led the way in implementing the vision (After Sun came up with the idea). Now it's possible for a company to build a highly complex application and deploy it to Amazon's cloud infrastructure and pay a minimal amount to start off, but have virtually unlimited resources to scale up as they grow. Having a company like Amazon or Google, or Microsoft run the data center should be comforting for customers of these online applications. It means that there are specialized security experts figuring out how to secure things, specialized storage experts figuring out how to back thins up and keep data online, specialized performance experts worrying about how to keep things fast, and specialized operations people keeping things running and available. This is something that most online companies would not be able to do anywhere close to as well as these bigger, specialized companies could do. Amazon has lots of experience running a huge data center for their own applications and they are able to use that expertise to run other company's applications as well.
But, that doesn't mean that even the big boys are immune from downtime, data loss or security issues. Just this week, in the prime Christmas shopping season, Amazon's Ec2 cloud went down for a short time. This mainly probably impacted a number of online applications of startups that were trying to make things happen at this prime time of year. Even though users can get some relief from knowing that applications they use online are being managed by a large, specialized company, there are still concerns that need to be thought through. Core IT principles still need to be followed. It's not enough to trust your service provider to keep your data secure, or back it up consistently. You need to make sure that you are caring for the IT assets that run your business.
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