Disaster Recovery Sites
Disaster recovery plans (DRPs) define how the procedures to follow to recover a system or site to a working state. A disaster can be anything that causes the loose of data or service, it can be human created, a simple power failure, a natural calamities such as fire flooding.
Site resiliency are described as:
- Hot site
- Warm site
- Cold site
Hot site:
A hot site is a site that is full on ready to perform the recovery. Hot sites responds almost instantly during failure, these sites are kept ready around the clock. Hot sites are mostly considered as the organization own devices, links, personnels or the organization owned data center.
Warm site:
A warm site is a data center with equipped devices such as network, hardware but the softwares or the live data is not available on these sites. In some cases the organizations might need to add additional equipments to perform the recovery. Warm sites can perform recoveries from few hours and can also takes up to days, the time it takes to recover depends upon the amount of the data or the softwares that is required for the sites to fully get back to working condition. The time can also based upon the additional device that needs to be introduced to these sites. Warm sites are specially data centers that are not on premise or the leases data center spaces and hardware for disaster recovery.
Cold site:
A cold site is the site that doesn’t have the required equipments for the related services. These sites can be equipped with the required primary infrastructure such as IT, cold site can be considered as a leased building by an organization with the IT support, however during the recovery process these sites are very slow as these sites would require the hardware to be installed and the data or the softwares to be restored, typically these sites would can take days, weeks to months to get to fully working condition.
To establish the Disaster recovery sites with this label is complex to design and very expensive for an organization to plan and operate. On the other hand most of the space and the hardware also sit ideal.
For many companies, the most cost effective and easy solution would be to move the processing and the data storage to the cloud, this takes up the challenge and the cost of maintaining the data centers from an organization. As the data centers are in different geographical regions which also helps the service be accessible even if one area is affected the service or the data can be accessed from another location.