ABSTRACT
Cloud service provider (CSP) organizations in general, and their physical data centers in particular, are vulnerable to catastrophic and force majeure risks, including the following: natural disasters, human-caused hazards, and accidents and technology hazards. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning for IT Professionals offers a comprehensive list of distal catastrophic risks confronting enterprises, including cloud service customer (CSC). The fundamental risks presented to a CSC by a CSP catastrophe are as follows: prolonged or permanent loss of cloud service from impacted cloud data center, and prolonged or permanent loss of CSC data hosted in impacted cloud data center. While some data center outages may be promptly repairable, other outages are more persistent. CSP catastrophe risks can cause an impacted CSP availability zone, data center, or perhaps even the entire organization to be incapable of serving CSC demand temporarily. CSCs set target recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).
