[123pie123]

just to confirm I when i say small(ish) enterprise - i'm referring to company with around 500+ people and a IT dept of over 20+ people

seriously??!? you think you need thousands of people to to improve your effeciency and performance I would strongly suggest employing a few good infrastructure engineers/ architects who know what they're talking about - there really is no secret sauce!! just lots of kool aid on cloud

the whole cloud thing only looks wonderful and magical if your inexperienced.

re: the whole up time x9 thing is fairly useless in the real world, since the architecture of the application is really the king here!! christ on a stick i got an application running 100% for 3+ years on NT 4 because of good design (the clue is active - active - active)

also to add... availibilty zones are a very very poor mans DR