When disasters strike, there is little that the mankind can do to avert them. Such is nature\\'s wrath. It is purely unpredictable and the magnitude can only be anticipated. In such scenarios, although human lives can be saved through prior intimations, establishments cannot be and thus, the worry for the business organizations. What if a disaster strikes?

Cloud Computing has been smart enough to foresee such instances and has incorporated mitigation schemes to avert such losses. The physical establishments may be hard to recover, but what remains of more importance is the data. Therefore, data recovery is the first on the list, for the idea is to leap back to normalcy after the disaster withers away. The location of set-up and their disaster vulnerability is certainly a feature of all the cloud computing service providers.

It is very much expected that there will be a certain downtime in case of such occurrences. The first is to classify those risks and their weighted possible damage. There are ideally few kinds of risks as viewed in cloud computing business namely - atural risks, human induced risks, civil risks, externally factored risks and supplier risks. All these risks refer to categories of events. For instance, an act of terrorism or sabotage will be counted under human risks and the mitigation plan must be well prepared to stock of any such situation.

There can be another type which is usually known as facility risks. This type lists the risks that are posed by a facility failure - electricity outage, structural or infrastructural flaws, air conditioning failures, fire breakout etc. Ideally, cloud servers keep a back-up plan in place. The same cluster of data is stored at multiple check points. Therefore, if any one of the infrastructure is lost, the other can be put to function till the previous one is recovered.

There are three phases to the disaster recovery plan namely the activation stage, the execution and the final being the reconstitution stage. The first stage addresses the announcement and damage assessment of the disaster; the second includes the execution of the procedures to put the business operations back to the functioning mode and finally the third is the reconstitution of the damaged resources.

These are the broad steps taken by every disaster recovery team of the cloud service providers. However, different groups might have added diverse stages to their functions, but the main concern remains to put the facility back to operation at the earliest possible. Business operations do get affected, but the best industry practices have shown that they come to a halt owing to the multiple storage facilities maintained by the cloud computing service providers. But then, God forbid such disasters.