The recent outages of Google and Microsoft’s Outlook.com reinforce concerns many businesses have about relying on cloud services and may cause organizations that have already moved or are considering moving to the cloud to reconsider. When you look at the big picture, though, you can still trust the cloud.

It’s no secret at this point that there are a number of benefits to using cloud services. Cloud providers are generally able to take advantage of economies of scale that let them offer servers, storage, and services cheaper on a per user basis than what businesses can accomplish on its own—particularly small and medium businesses that have fewer employees to average the investment across.

Along with those benefits, however, comes the stark reality that you’re entrusting your business to third-party companies and to servers that exist somewhere “out there.” If your Internet connection fails for any reason, or if those servers suffer an outage as Google and Microsoft did, suddenly business grinds to a halt.

Five nines reiliability

It’s obviously a huge deal when servers or services you depend on are unavailable, and your business is dead in the water at the mercy of a third party. That sucks. But before you swear never to trust the cloud again, think of the bigger picture.

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