disaster recovery plans for companies when infrastructure housed on the cloud

Is it common to still maintain a disaster recovery plan when you migrate your servers and host them on a cloud infrastructure, as opposed to maintaining your own internal network infrastructure, and are there any reasons why you still maintain a DR plan? Do any of the DR plan requirements change when housing your servers on a cloud - and could some examples be provided?
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pma111Asked:
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dbruntonQuid, Me Anxius Sum?  Illegitimi non carborundum.Commented:
What happens when your Cloud server goes down?  Are there provisions for the Cloud server being backed up and easily restored by the company that hosts it?

Who owns your data if the company that hosts your Cloud server goes bankrupt or out of business?  Have a look at the contract and how solvent that company is and the terms and conditions of the contract.

How easy is it for you to transfer your data back from the Cloud server?

How secure is your data on the Cloud server?  Who has access to it?

Short story:  You still need a DR plan.

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Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert / EE MVE^2)VMware and Virtualization ConsultantCommented:
Depends on what Service Level Agreements you have with the Cloud Company and Vendor, and what they provide, in terms of Backup and Restore and DR.

But my guess would be as most cloud vendors provide you with Consumer Grade Cloud Hosting, the answer is you still need a DR plan!
Shalom CarmelCTOCommented:
A DR plan is not only for the Big Disasters like mentioned above.
An administrator deleting all files by mistake is a disaster.
A lost laptop that contains the only copy of a private SSH key used by root is a disaster.
A DDOS attack on the server's IP address is a disaster.
A hacker who inserted SQL injection into your database and your production DB is fubar is a disaster.
Even an online service that due to high demand crashes for 8 hours a week before christmas is a disaster.

What you plan for is business continuity, taking into account resource unavailability, data corruption, and generally interruption of services.

Fortunately, cloud providers like AWS make it easier for even a small business to plan well for disasters, within a sane budget. You get access to tools, methods and technology that usually are affordable only to large enterprises.

You have unlimited storage, storage volumes on demand, volume snapshots, private images, load balancers, vips, fleet management (autoscaling),  availability zones, and configuration management.

When you make use of them you truly are in the cloud, otherwise you just rent a virtual server. Go get a VPS from godaddy instead.
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