In the end, cloud providers — many of which aim for 99.9 percent uptime, or “three nines” — are likely to offer individual companies a more reliable service than those companies attain for themselves, the CSA’s Howie says.

via Cloud Providers Work To Disperse Points Of Failure – Dark Reading.

Note that telecom typically operates under 5 nines uptime.  The point of this article may be that end users need to implement their own backup plans to get higher than three 9s reliability.