Amazon EC2

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Hollywood movies inspire us with wondrous sights and well-crafted dialogue. The jokes in The Avengers blend seamlessly into the bright blue skies and intense battle scenes, while the fantasy realm in Snow White and the Huntsman feels like something from a twisted dream.

Dell's unveiling of a cloud infrastructure today comes five years to the month after Amazon announced its Elastic Compute Cloud beta, which may well have been the first service to call itself a cloud.

Thursday, April 21, is a day that Michael Downing, the CEO and CFO of social media start-up Tout, won't soon forget. In the wee hours of the morning, Downing learned a harsh lesson: cloud computing is not bulletproof.

The servers are back up and users can once again check in on Foursquare and ask questions on Quora, but the legacy of last week's Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) outage will live on and provide important lessons for businesses as they look to cloud computing for their IT future.

Despite the heightened focus on cloud availability and uptime caused by Amazon's prolonged service outage last week, security will likely remain the bigger long-term concern for enterprises, analysts say.

For a company that's known as the dominant player in the cloud market, Amazon's troubles on Thursday means a black eye for the company and for the cloud in general.