Every CIO seeks to have a simple disaster recovery strategy to follow when the time calls for it. Ofcourse, relying on a 200-page procedure to recover from a disaster is a not a good idea, especially during emergencies. Once a system failure occurs and the pressure is on, it is quixotic to expect someone to adhere to complex procedures without committing any error; not hust theoratically, but practically, systems should recoverable with just one click.

Critical applications increasingly being moved to the cloud is a major change for IT risk management and disaster recovery, as an organization's disaster recovery and business continuation fate are handed over to third-party vendors.

Today’s best of breed cloud solutions enable organizations to turn their data recovery system into a live clone of the IT environment. It can even be used as a development and test platform without impacting production. Moving this workload completely into the cloud eliminates the need for cumbersome and expensive maintenance of development/test environments.

To minimize downtime by utilizing multiple layers of instant recovery capability to recover an independent off-site location (cloud) will have a major impact. IT managers who have hosted applications on cloud, or are thinking of doing so, should perform the same DR due-diligence they would for in-house infrastructure.