Disaster Recovery Sites
- Within the scope of business continuity planning,
- disaster recovery plans (DRPs) describe the specific procedures to follow to recover a system or site to a working state
- disaster could be anything from:
- a loss of power or failure of a minor component
- to human-made or natural disasters
- disaster could be anything from:
- disaster recovery plans (DRPs) describe the specific procedures to follow to recover a system or site to a working state
Spare Sites
A spare site is another location that can provide the same (or similar) level of service.
- disaster or systems failure at one site will cause services to failover to the alternate site
- DRP must state:
- how this will happen
- what checks need to be made to ensure that failover has occurred successfully
- without loss of transactional data or service availability
- how to revert to the primary site once functionality is restored there
Site Resiliency
- levels of site resiliency:
- hot site
- quickest access to restore critical data in the event of a disaster or catastrophe
- can failover almost immediately
- site is already within the organization’s ownership and is ready to deploy
- typically involve the latest and greatest storage equipment and the fastest protocols
- typically located close to the client or in multiple locations to ensure fast access
- e.g.,
- hot site could consist of a building with operational computer equipment that is kept updated with a live dataset
- warm site
- similar but with the requirement that the latest dataset will need to be loaded
- Alternate processing location that is dormant or performs noncritical functions under normal conditions, but which can be rapidly converted to a key operations site if needed
- cold site
- offers less frequent access and is maintained on minimal equipment that is considered lower performance
- Returning to normal operations is slower
- significant advantage of cold storage
- it is less expensive than hot storage
- may be an empty building with a lease agreement in place to install whatever equipment is required when necessary
- offers less frequent access and is maintained on minimal equipment that is considered lower performance
- hot site
Geographic dispersion is a resiliency mechanism where processing and data storage resources are replicated between physically distant sites.
- aims to ensure that recovery sites are located far enough apart to minimize the impact of regional disasters
Cloud as Disaster Recovery
- redundancy at scale is expensive and complex
- sites are often leased from service providers
- business can also enter reciprocal arrangements to provide mutual support
- cost-effective but complex to setup
- most cost-effective solution is to use a cloud site
- cloud operator should be able to maintain hot site redundancy so that a geographic disaster in one area will not disrupt service bc of support from another in a different region
- cloud providers offer more affordable redundancy and backup options
- due to their economies of scale
- offer
- scalability
- geographic diversity
- faster deployment
- simplified management