Network World — The total public cloud services market in 2011 was $91 billion and it will grow to $207 billion in 2016, according to Gartner. Despite this tremendous surge, large, very publicized cloud outages have everyone thinking about cloud risks. The reality, however, is that outages with large public cloud providers aren't more common than they are with a business' own private infrastructure. In fact, for many organizations, these cloud providers probably provide better uptime than they could achieve on their own.

The Amazon Outage in Perspective: Failure Is Inevitable, So Manage Risk

The trick is to design for failure (see http://www.wired.com/business/2011/04/lessons-amazon-cloud-failure/). Organizations that take failure into account build a robust and dynamic infrastructure that can withstand any cloud failure. Here are three ways to help you avoid the impacts of any public cloud providers' next cloud outage.

[ MORE: 5 tips for surviving a cloud outage ]

* Balance across availability zones. Large public cloud providers' data centers are built across availability zones (AZs) and regions. While serving similar purposes across providers, Amazon describes its AZs as "distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region." The idea is that by having your application instances in separate AZs, if one zone goes down, users can be redirected in real-time to another one. If the secondary zone is far from the end user, performance may be slower, but your service will be up and running.

Okta, an on-demand identity and access management service, is one company that has been fairly vocal about using AZs to avoid business disruption. After Amazon's July outage, Okta wrote a blog post -- Own Your Own Availability: Zero Downtime During the AWS Outage -- talking about how the downtime that many businesses experienced didn't need to occur. Because of the software and operational investments Okta had made across its five-availability-zone footprint in the region the outage occurred in (and in two availability zones in another region), its customers weren't affected. Netflix and Zynga are two other companies that have publicized their use of AZs to help avoid service disruption during outages.

* Cloud balance. Similar to balancing across AZs, you can also balance across multiple cloud providers. This means that, instead of just using Amazon Web Services (AWS), you use a combination of AWS with Joyent, Azure, Rackspace and/or another provider, diverting traffic to an available cloud in the event of a failure.

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