Now that the CDC has updated its Zombie Apocalypse guidelines, CIOs are beholden to take the burgeoning waves of undead very seriously. (OK, maybe not that seriously.) Can you imagine trying to explain to your shareholders why your data center disaster recovery plan was foiled by the scourge from the grave? Or how your IT admin attacked and ate your user base? That’s a black mark on just about anyone’s resumé.

As all viewers of AMC’s The Walking Dead know, when zombies come into town, you almost certainly will lose electricity. Of course, because you’re a smart CIO, you’ve already installed an uninterruptible power supply that’s able to handle the load of keeping everything up and working. Your generator has been recently tested and is strong enough to power the data center. And if you’re really clever, you’ve had the forethought to make sure that the generator can start up automatically, since no one is going to want to brave the random zombies milling around in the office’s back parking lot (or wherever the generator is stored) just to get the servers moving. If anything, the undead event will be a great test of just how power hungry your data center really is. In fact, hindsight is always 20/20, and this just might be the push to move toward solar-power generation and green data center cooling techniques, like the oil-submerged servers we covered last month.

Assuming that your employees are hiding in their basements and attics, waiting out the ghoulish invasion, it would be nice if they could brave the hours by checking their email with their mobile devices or even get some work done by accessing their virtual remote desktops or with a thin client on their iPad. This, of course, will be possible because you’ve already taken the precaution of diligent remote data backups in case the invaders have already made it into the corporate offices (Probably through that door by the cafeteria. It never closes right.)  Of course, everyone who has ever watched a zombie movie knows that you can only count on the elements within your own control, so if you bank on cloud service providers, you also have a cloud backup and recovery plan for when their headquarters are overrun by creatures searching for braaaaaaains.

All fun aside, there’s still time in 2011 to test your disaster recovery plans and make sure that you’re shipshape and can withstand anything.  Whether it’s a disaster of movie monsters or something as natural as a flood or an earthquake, George A. Romero taught us an important lesson: it’s that only the lucky and the prepared truly come out of a disaster unscathed.

“Since [the cloud providers] have the data and system images hosted for you, they will recover you at their site on virtual sites now, for some time,” said Forrester analyst Stephanie Balaouras.

SMBs are backing up desktops, servers and storage in the cloud. This is the first time many of the companies have had any type of disaster recovery plan, for desktops in particular, she said.

Based on a report titled “How the Cloud Will Transform Disaster Recovery Services,” Balaouras outlines some of the benefits and costs of disaster recovery plans in the cloud:

• Pricing is transparent and subscription-based. Pricing includes all the software, infrastructure and services to deliver the solution. You are typically charged per gigabyte of data, per server, or for a combination of the two. The only cost not included is the cost of network connectivity. You pay for only the servers you want to protect.

• Deployment is fast and easy. Most of the recovery configuration can be done online, because there’s no need to reserve identical hardware, set up proprietary links or negotiate your specific SLA. Since the backup is to virtual volumes and servers, you simply have to ensure that the right virtualization layers are in use. However, these services are typically limited to your x86 server environments.

• Oversubscription risk is minimized. In traditional DR services, the provider subscribes several clients to the same IT resources, closely manages the oversubscription ratio and avoids subscribing clients from the same region to the same equipment. But there’s a chance that multiple, simultaneous disasters will be declared, in which case you won’t get access to the IT equipment you’ve spent thousands of dollars a month holding in reserve. While the same can still be true with cloud DR services, the risk is minimized because far more customers can be packed onto the same physical IT infrastructure.

• The penalty for rehearsing is reduced. What good is a DR plan if you don’t rehearse it to make sure it works? Traditional DR service providers recognize this but have to schedule rehearsals, reserve equipment and often be on call for you during the rehearsal. All this prep costs money and is typically above and beyond the DR services contract. With cloud DR services, there’s usually minimal or no prep required, allowing you to rehearse more easily and at much lower cost.

SMBs aren’t giving up all their data. Many are still backing up data locally and using cloud providers as a storage vault. If anything, the cloud is another tool that SMBs can use to cut costs and form the basis of a disaster recovery plan. For more advice on DR strategies, check out our guide on developing a DR plan.