You must be living in some kind of fantasy land like the execs at Microsoft.
Not every place on earth has reliable, high speed internet access. You're really at the mercy of the ISP with limited options.
Our clients for the most part experience zero downtime over the 4-5 year lifepsan of servers other than planned reboots for maintenance which are done off-hours.
Also on the RDP point you are confusing cloud servers and cloud services.
Exchange Online/Office 365 is a cloud service, not a cloud server.
The only management capabilities you have are to use a web based management console to add and remove users, everyone shares the underlying exchange servers with other customers, there is no RDP access. If you have a problem the only option is to submit a ticket and take a number for microsoft to fix the problem for you.
You are confused between the differences of software as a service (i.e. office 365) and hosted cloud servers like you'll get with Amazon EC2 or Rackspace.
I can tell you with 100% certainty there have been at least two instances in the past year where E-mail stopped working for customers on Hosted Exchange/Office 365, while their internet and internal server was functioning fine.
Also if you weren't paying attention, netflix went down last week because of power issues in their "cloud". Along with a bunch of other Amazon EC2 customers.
Half of these big companies don't even design their "cloud" properly with geographical redundancy and seamless fail over.
That is what a "cloud" really is, running a service in a single data center/region/availability zone is not a cloud.
