Polar vortexes, rising sea levels, hotter and longer summers, and storms oceans conjure up stack the deck against data centers, cloud-based or on-premise.

Only 10% of enterprises have shut down their data centers, which makes a disaster recovery (DR) plan imperative to handling the throes of climate change. That means 90% of companies are in harm's way. 

The move to the cloud alleviates some of the stress on-premise data centers put on the environment and eases a company's responsibility of protecting a data center. By 2025, 80% of businesses will favor moving to the cloud, transitioning away from traditional data centers, according to Gartner.

DR plans around legacy systems is limiting at best. 

"It feels like the old rules might be outdated compared to the new wave of climate change disasters that we're seeing," said Greg Arnette, technology evangelist for Barracuda Networks, in an interview with CIO Dive.

Nearly two-thirds of organizations with a DR plan lack one that would actually work, said Arnette. "We have high aspirations in the industry, but we're not doing enough to actually ensure we're meeting those aspirations." 

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Only 10% of enterprises have shut down their data centers, which makes a disaster recovery (DR) plan imperative to handling the throes of climate change. That means 90% of companies are in harm's way.

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Goals are largely set by big cloud players and companies are looking to them for guidance and tools. "Decision makers have to reconcile with what's going on around us," Arnette said. 

Companies with DR sites geographically separate and sufficiently distant enough from primary sites are better poised for recovery. A location powered by an independent electrical grid offers more peace of mind. 

Enter DRaaS

Implementing a disaster recovery business continuity (DRBC) plan is easier and cheaper than in the past. Companies have the option to subscribe to a solution, like disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).

DRaaS is a "half measure" between moving all workloads to the cloud and benefiting from cloud economics where companies can use the cloud as a DR site for on-prem IT workloads, said Arnette.

It's "going to be an attractive middle ground option during this period of transition" where IT departments are moving things from on-prem to cloud, said Arnette. As for the workloads that never make it to the cloud, vendors will offer various forms of DRaaS and make plans "more bulletproof."

Cloud vendors are moving into the DRaaS market. Microsoft was "the first to realize" DRaaS "can be an attractive lead-in to overall more cloud consumption," according to Arnette. Azure Site Recovery is fully integrated, equipped with performance drills.

Amazon acquired CloudEndure for its DR and migration solutions for AWS customers. CloudEndure Migration "continually replicates your source machines into a staging area in your AWS account," according to the company.

What are companies to do?

Nearly one-quarter of organizations consider themselves data-driven, according to an IDC report sponsored by Zerto, making resilience a crucial part of business. 

The costs of going to the cloud for secondary protection aren't cheap. However, companies stand to lose an average of $250,000 per hour of downtime, or $2 million for eight hours of downtime in a year, according to IDC. The direct and indirect loss of revenue and productivity contribute to the costs. 

Cloud leaders are opening up the DR services and taking the reins when it comes to their impact on the environment.  

Cloud-based DRaaS has some "attractive components to it because the way a DR site operates is 99.9% dormant, just waiting to come alive in the event of a disaster," said Arnette. "So when all that infrastructure is sitting idle, it's consuming a little bit of computing, a little bit of electricity, but as it comes to life, it'll consume a lot more."

Eventually, that consumption will come from "renewable pools of energy" that the cloud providers are harvesting.