6 steps to survive a cloud outage

Determine what needs to be done to implement the DR plan. Some plans are automatic. For example, vital workloads are often protected through some type of clustering, and a cluster should continue to function even when a node -- or instance -- fails. However, a DR strategy for less important workloads can require manual intervention or discrete steps, such as restoring and relaunching a snapshot or switching over to a backup instance.

When manual intervention is required, consider the effort and expense involved in the recovery process and determine the business value of initiating the recovery. Ask if recovering a workload will take longer and cost more than simply waiting for the cloud provider to resolve the outage. Communications from the cloud provider will influence this determination heavily.