Google was Down for 5 Minutes, Did losing your "in the Cloud Drive" effect you?

Recently, its was announced that on Friday Aug 16th, Google had a 50-70% error in requests sent to their servers. This included Google Mail, Google Plus and their Google Docs and Drive Cloud based services.

In an article pertaining to the outage on Forbes, author Tim Worstall poised the rather interesting question of

"…Should we actually expect Google's systems to run perfectly all the time anyway? How much downtime should we accept as just being part and parcel of the way the world works?"

As the computing world continually suggests that we move towards a Cloud based computing model, the question that Mr. Worstall poses in his article are rather sound.  Sure, in this case it was a Five minute outage of Google's services, but just what does happen if Google, or any other Cloud based company, has a Major and expended outage.  What back up plans will your Company, or you personally, can you rely on in this situation.

truly something to consider, if 5 minutes without Google dropped 40% of Internet traffic, what happens if it's 5 hours? 5 Days? or even 5 Weeks?