When evaluating cloud services, many organizations make the mistake of focusing largely on a service's contracted price. While this takes into account the initial outlay and operational cost of a cloud service, it fails to consider the potential losses a business can incur when a service that does not accurately meet all of its specific needs.

As Philip T. Kiser details in "Deciding Between Public Cloud and Managed Services", you have many options when building out your cloud. These different options offer varying levels of reliability and availability. Commodity-class public cloud services, for example, offer low cost but they provide only best-effort service. If these services support a critical part of your organization, service failure can bring your business to a standstill. For some companies, downtime can be measured in millions of dollars an hour and likely many dissatisfied customers.

Managed services can come into play for applications needing minimum levels of reliability. Managed services are implemented in your data center but managed by your cloud provider. This frees you to focus on running your business rather than managing your network. Depending upon the provider, you can also get public cloud services with enterprise-class performance. For example, every cloud provider offering Cisco Powered services provides, at a minimum, enterprise-class service backed by SLAs that guarantee 99.99% to 99.999% uptime. With more than 600 Cisco Powered providers and resellers offering 575+ services, there are local and global capabilities available to you throughout the world.

Some applications, however, need an even higher level of reliability and availability. For example, if the voice services for a contact center go down, this can quickly escalate into severe revenue losses for an organization. For this reason, cloud providers like TeleSpace take their Cisco Powered services to the highest levels: carrier-class availability.

TeleSpace achieves this by building redundancy throughout its network. Consider that many organizations are powered by only a single circuit. If the power goes out, these organizations are limited by the capacity of their uninterruptible power supply (UPS). Because TeleSpace is able to share its cost among its customers, it can provide the highest levels of redundancy. With their own backhaul and six carriers coming into their cloud, the odds of a TeleSpace service going down are on a level with which an on-premises data center simply can't compete.

However, not every application needs enterprise- or carrier-class service. In these cases, commodity-class service can be cost effective. But for the mission-critical parts of your business, downtime losses mean commodity-class services actually provide you marginal service at a higher cost. By selecting a service with the right level of reliability, you can avoid downtime losses that eat away at the profitability of your business and minimize the risk of losing dissatisfied customers.

To find a provider who can offer you enterprise- or carrier-class cloud services, visit the Cisco Partner Locator.