You can’t prevent your cloud service provider from going down, but there are ways to protect yourself

For example, Web-based disk encryption vendor AlertBoot, headquartered in Las Vegas, used to pay $50,000 a month just for electricity, AlertBoot CEO Tim Maliyil says.

Best Microsoft MCTS Training, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com

“We had two physical data centers at one point — and you can’t believe how happy we were to shut it down,” he says. “Now, two clouds, bandwidth and hosting is $16,000 a month. There was so much waste of electricity and capacity. The cloud really minimized our costs and ongoing expenses.”

Transitioning to cloud providers wasn’t difficult, because AlertBoot was already using virtualization software from VMware in its traditional data center, he says. The two cloud providers the company picked are SunGard and OpSource, both of which use VMware technology as well. (Systems integrator Dimension Data announced recently that it plans to acquire OpSource.)

Switching from one cloud provider to another now takes just a minute or two, he says, and the backup cloud can ramp up quickly to handle increased load. The switch-over itself is handled by a service from Zeus Technology, a U.K. vendor that helps companies move applications from one cloud to another.

Maliyil said that his company selected these vendors because they are known for their enterprise-level reliability. “For the kind of business we’re in, and our customers’ [lack of] tolerance for failure, we’ve steered away from the Amazon infrastructure,” he says.

Another vendor that helps companies manage services running on multiple clouds is rPath, which has more than 90 corporate customers, mostly large enterprises and ISPs, including ADM, Fujitsu, Qualcomm and EMC.

The company currently deploys to 16 types of image formats, which are snapshots of applications that run in cloud environments. Adding another cloud to the list typically takes less than a week, says Jake Sorofman, rPath’s chief marketing officer. “It’s fairly trivial for us.”

The company currently supports Amazon EC2, VMware, Citrix Zen, Microsoft HyperV, Rackspace and several other formats. Once an application is in the rPath system, it takes as little as 15 minutes to generate a new image and deploy it to a new cloud, he says.

However, architecting an application for the rPath system in the first place can take a little longer. “The process of packaging a new application for our platform could take from a couple of hours to a couple of days, depending on its complexity,” he says. “But we have a professional services team that does that work for customers if they choose.”

Many applications are already packaged up, he says, including the full range of Windows and Linux operating systems, WebLogic and WebSphere, SAP, EMC and RSA products.

“There’s a fairly extensive list of complete stacks that have already been modeled using our technology, and can be leveraged,” he says.

And having the option to move applications between clouds does more than just provide backup options for companies, he says – it also allows companies to get the best possible deals from their providers.

“There is an arbitrage opportunity that comes with having choice,” he says. “Being able to optimize where workloads are running based on performance, policy and price. And, to the extent that you can easily move a workload between Amazon, Rackspace or other environments, you have leverage over your service providers because you have eliminated lock-in.”