December 14, 2021: -When Amazon Web Services, the biggest cloud-computing infrastructure provider, suffered an hours-long outage on Tuesday, Disney+, Netflix, Robinhood, Roku, and different popular websites and apps faced significant disruptions.

The incident rekindled a debate on how organizations can minimize the impact of an outage in an era when data and services are dependent on cloud data centers. Can big businesses rely on a single vendor, or do they need to spread their workloads if something like this happens again?

Two days following the AWS snafu, an emerging company known as HashiCorp went public on the Nasdaq, selling a multicolored story that’s resonating among a growing number of enterprises. HashiCorp’s software is helping engineers set up resources in multiple clouds, often some combination of AWS, Microsoft, and Google, the three U.S. market leaders.

HashiCorp closed its second day of trading with a market cap of over $15 billion, signaling an increase in demand for its subscription software and a desire to work across clouds. Revenue in the latest quarter jumped 49% to $82.2 million.

HashiCorp’s software finds use at retailer Target, running applications in its data centers, stores, and cloud services from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

“I want commercial independence,” said Mike McNamara, Target’s chief information officer, in an interview. “These are relatively huge amounts of money. They’re big spends. And I want to maintain control for the deployments and management within Target so that I can move workloads to Azure if GCP gets expensive, or vice-versa.”

Target is not reporting technical issues in the Amazon downtime. A spokesperson said the company got off a cloud of Amazon years ago.

AWS doesn’t often promote the idea of the use of multiple public clouds, preferring that customers stick with Amazon for all of their cloud-computing needs. The multi-cloud trend is a boon for Google and Microsoft, which are waiting to take market share from their larger rival.