Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN)'s brief outage on Monday, following an even briefer Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) outage last Friday, could shine an even brighter light on reliability issues and dependency on cloud services.

The Monday outage of Amazon.com, which lasted between 15 minutes and 25 minutes, depending on whose report you believe, did not affect Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud, according to the AWS dashboard. Its main impact was on lost sales by Amazon and its partners.

Last Friday's two-minute (or maybe five-minute) Google outage had arguably greater impact, taking down all of the Google Apps and causing a brief 40 percent drop in Internet traffic, according to Web analytics firm GoSquared. Because of the scope of Google's reach -- email, calendaring, maps, document sharing, YouTube etc. -- even a brief outage affects a lot of people.

As of late Monday, Google wasn't saying what happened Friday, which has led to some wild speculation, up to and including security concerns that could well be valid.

But as someone who sees her cloud backup as the most secure storage of precious photos and other documents that I can get, I'm wondering: Are we all prepared to live in a world where short outages aren't uncommon? And will events like these make us rethink how we depend on these Web giants?

— Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading