Using cloud services can also be more budget-friendly. By eliminating significant hardware costs, they cut out large upfront capital expenses. Instead, DR becomes a flexible, pay-as-you-go operating expense, where companies only pay for the capacity they consume, and can fine-tune or terminate services altogether on demand.

Recovery-as-a-service can also help assure reliability. With no upfront investment, it is easier to test a solution before adoption. Moreover, cloud-based DR technology has matured to the point of providing reliable quality of service and uptime levels, as well as cloud-based validation of backed-up data.

Still, there are many challenges that businesses must consider that are unique to cloud-based DR. For example, placing your backups in the cloud may create greater dependency on network availability and, subsequently, in the service levels of your providers.

Likewise, with cloud-based DR, companies can have less control over throughput, and any degraded performance can potentially generate transactional lag time. While this might not significantly affect recovery of static files or email, it can make cloud-based DR inappropriate in other scenarios, such as in recovering dynamically replicated databases. Increased demand for additional bandwidth might also result in unanticipated cost overruns.