“The cloud is a natural solution for disaster recovery, but careful consideration must be given before entrusting your data to a sky-high backup repository. So when it comes to online backup, the cloud is an important feature that can play a large role in securing and protecting during a disaster, which I like to refer to as cloud recovery,” said Peter Laundenslager, Business Development Manager for Double-Take in his article for TechNewsWorld detailing 5 keys for full recovery in the cloud:

1. Recover Workloads in the Cloud
Having a backup copy of your data is important, but it takes more than a pile of tapes (or an online account) to restore. You might need a replacement server, new storage, and maybe even a new data center, depending on what went wrong.
The traditional solutions to this need are to either keep spare servers in a disaster recovery data center or suffer the downtime while you order and configure new equipment. With a cloud recovery solution, you don't want just your data in the cloud -- you want the ability to actually start up applications and use them, no matter what went wrong in your environment.

2. Unlimited Scalability
If you were buying disaster recovery servers for yourself, you would have to buy one for each of your critical production servers. The whole point of recovering to the cloud is that they already have plenty of servers.
The ideal cloud recovery solution won't charge you for those servers up front but is sure to have as much capacity as you need, when you need it. Under this model, your costs are much lower than building it yourself, because you get the benefit of duplicating your environment without the cost.

3. Pay-Per-Use Billing
Pay-as-you-go business models force the vendor to have a good product. This makes the buying decision much easier – just sign up for a month or two (or six), and see how it goes.
Removing the up-front price and long-term commitment shifts the risk away from the customer and onto the vendor. The vendor has to keep the quality up to keep customers loyal.
We also know that data centres are more cost and management effort efficient on a larger scale. In your own data center, you might have some custom configurations, but in the data recovery data center, you just need racks, stacks of servers, power and cooling. You are much better off paying a monthly fee to someone who specializes.

4. Secure and Reliable Infrastructure
Lots of people like to bash cloud providers for security and reliability. However, although one can point to places where cloud providers have demonstrated flaws, as a customer evaluating a cloud vendor, it seems better to compare them to your own capabilities. Most major cloud providers' infrastructures are more secure and more reliable than those of most private data centres – security and reliability are hard, but they are easier at scale. Having control over your own data center isn't enough -- you also have to spend the money to buy the necessary equipment, software, and expertise, it is easier and more cost effective to do this on a large scale, so outsource it to specialists.

5. Complete Protection
As a general rule, your backup products should protect everything. Lots of online products offer 20GB plans which can have problematic consequences as not everything can be protected. The places people normally get bitten by this are with databases (do you have the right agent?), configuration changes (patched your server, or added a new directory of files?), and weird applications (the one that a consultant set up, and you don't really understand how it works). Complete protection means that all of these things can be protected without requiring an expert in either your own systems, or with the cloud recovery solution.