However business continuity is important. If your database, or application server goes down, what would you do? In most cases you would sit in your office waiting for the cloud provider to come back online. That's not much different from in-house failures where you may wait on the network or OS administrators to recover a host server. In a few of the disasters I've experienced, I only had slightly more control than I'd guess a cloud provider gives me.
Steve.
The difference is that when it is in-house the admins are dedicated to our systems. In the cloud they might decide someone else's system is more important than yours.
And using the cloud as a DR backup? I'm not too sure about that. I worked for a company that was on a government contract and we were looking at an off-site DR location. It would be a shared system. In other words, the site has the equipment, but it is only used when a disaster happens. You store tapes/whatever there and restore them to the off-site equipment when you need their system. HOWEVER, in a major disaster other companies might beat you to the equipment and you could be out in the 'cold'. We passed on that.
If you go to the cloud for a DR backup, you need to ask if the 'storage/systems/whatever' are dedicated for your company or are shared on as needed basis. As needed can be okay, but what if a major disaster happens? How many companies needed to bring up equipment in a remote location after the Twin Towers got hit? WHat if all the companies in that building had their backup plan going to the same DR site and it was on first-come/first-served basis?
I've also seen in the news where servers in the cloud were taken by the FBI because they had evidence of a crime. Intermingled in the same servers were other business' data. They lost their data until the FBI returned the hardware. Can your company afford to lose data because it's on a drive that is also used by another company? (If I can find the article, I'll update this with the link).
-SQLBill