Which disaster recovery strategy is right for my organization? A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a documented process or set of procedure to recover and protect a business IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster. Before answering the question that forms the title of this article, let us consider the three disaster recovery strategies.
First, among others is the Cold Site. The cold site is the bare bones approach to disaster recovery. These facilities have the basic infrastructure needed to run a data center, such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), power and networking connectivity, but not much else. Cold sites are designed to provide coverage for long –term outages of the primary site, such as those caused by a building fire, hurricane or other major disaster that renders the primary site completely inoperable. If a disaster does occur, an organization must then acquire the hardware necessary to resume operation, build systems, install applications and load data from backup tapes. It should be no surprise at all that the recovery time for cold sites is measure in days or weeks rather than in hours.
There is also the warm site which move the basic infrastructure provided at a cold site to include the hardware necessary to restore operations. Depending on the nature of the warm site, administrators may also choose to have hardware loaded with the operating systems and/or applications required to resume operations. The time required to activate a warm site depends on many of the decisions made when configuring the warm site. Is the organization’s data stored on a storage system that can be directly accesses by servers at the site or does it need to be restored from tape? Are operating sites already loaded on the hardware at the site? Are applications installed on those systems as well? In cases where the answers to these questions are yes, an organization can typically activate the warm site in a matter of hours. In other cases, it may take several days to get the site up and running. Finally, there is the hot site which provides the ultimate disaster recovery experience, with instantaneous or near real time recovery operations when the primary site fails. The significant investment of time and money required to start up a hot site provides the organization with the ability to resume operations in minutes or seconds after a disaster disrupts operations at the primary site. In the end choosing the correct option for a DR site for your organization depends on the budget, sensitivity of the data, amount of risk you are willing to take on and the amount of time you are able to take before fully restoring your business operations. It is absolutely essential for one to take on an assessment of an organization’s specific needs and the budget that you are willing to allocate for a DR site. Virtual Private Network | Cloud Backup Services | Cloud Based Services | Cloud Backup | Colocation | Hybrid Cloud | Dedicated Server | Remote Infrastructure Management