CT, you hit the nail right on the head regarding reliablility factors and cloud services. As I am always telling clients, "How solid is a cloud"?
A company I contract for had subcontracted cloud services to provide terminal services and DB hosts for its customers, and it had an outage in January that didn't 'fail over', as the cognescenti like to say. Their customers, who could not afford so much as five minutes of downtime, suffered close to a week. Of course, all that hate and discontent trickled down very quickly, and all parties involved took a fierce kick right between the goalposts. As for me, I was always well out of blast range.
I hate it when I'm right. And on matters such as this, I find myself right almost daily. It's not rocket science; not really.
If the global cisco network ever crashes hard, it’ll sure get interesting fast.
I always ask: “Just what technologies do cloud companies use that you do not have access to yourself? They are simply using those technologies and you are simply trusting they will do so without fail.”