SQLBill (12/13/2012)
[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
Fair points, though I'm not sure this mitigates the use of the cloud. If you were to choose AWS, Azure, or the Google Compute clouds, these are huge infrastructures. Not like many DR situations where the equipment is shared. Even a hurricane like Sandy, if it knocked out hundreds of businesses, these wouldn't exhaust the capabilities of an AWS. Not likely, though it's possible.
The idea of the FBI pulling your data, or a similar situation, is something to worry about, but I wouldn't worry about that with a cloud service where the data isn't on physical disks like it used to be in many shared, rent-a-VM hosting providers. It's spread out more like a SAN, with redundancy, so law enforcement pulling one down wouldn't pull your data.
The cloud isn't THE answer, and there are certainly potential problems, but if you stick with thinking about this as an old, App Service Provider or rent a VM paradigm, then you're not really paying attention to what some of the larger providers are offering.