As AWS and Netflix learned this past Christmas Eve, outages happen. The question isn’t how to avoid outages, but rather how to recover quickly and effectively when they occur. One approach is to develop a multi-cloud strategy – utilizing either different providers or multiple regions from the same provider – to build in safeguards against anything from a natural disaster to the workman in the street who accidentally chops into a cable. But multi-cloud strategies carry their own challenges. Besides coping with architecture and resource allocation, businesses that leverage more than one cloud provider are faced with forecasting cloud costs that have suddenly become even more complex and managing a high availability architecture across multiple clouds.