For the Fortune 1000, the average total cost of unplanned application downtime per year is $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion. The average cost of a critical application failure per hour is $500,000 to $1 million. Using cloud services for disaster recovery (DR) should be part of an organization's strategy for avoiding the huge cost of downtime.

Read these questions posed to Phil Goodwin, research director within IDC's Storage Systems and Software practice.