Average downtime per outage across clouds, private data centers and traditional hosting providers is 7.5 hours, according to a new infographic created by RightScale.

RightScale analyzed 27 publicly reported outages that occurred in 2012 and determined the length of outage, customers affected and the causes, which included power loss, natural disasters and human error, among others.

Despite frequent press coverage of public cloud outages, they represented 26% of the 2012 outages analyzed, with the remaining coming from private data centers, SaaS solutions and traditional hosting providers.

"Whether you are running your application in the cloud or not, our data shows that there are bound to be bumps in the road. If you’re not thinking about tweaking your cloud strategy to stay in front of outages or other hiccups, you’re placing vital company applications at risk," said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale.

"Apps have to protect themselves," said James Staten, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester. "The best practice for cloud application design and configuration is to build resiliency into the application rather than expect it from the cloud platform."