What are the types of Disaster Recovery?
Virtualization Disaster Recovery
Virtualization provides flexibility in disaster recovery. Servers are virtualized independent from the underlying hardware. Therefore, an organization does not need the same physical servers at the primary site as at its secondary disaster recovery site.
Network Disaster Recovery
A network disaster recovery plan identifies specific issues or threats related to an organization’s network operations as a result of network provider problems or disasters caused by nature or human activities.
Cloud-based Disaster Recovery
Cloud disaster recovery enables the backup and recovery of remote machines on a cloud-based platform. Cloud disaster recovery is primarily an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution that backs up designated system data on a remote offsite cloud server.
Data Center Disaster Recovery
Data center disaster recovery is the organizational planning to resume business operations following an unexpected event that may damage or destroy data, software, and hardware systems.
Which are the types of Disaster Recovery Sites?
Cold Backup Strategy
A cold site can be a backup facility with little or no hardware equipment installed. A cold site is an office space with basic utilities like power, cooling system, air con, communication system, etc. A cold site is the most cost-effective option among the three disaster recovery sites.
However, thanks to the very fact that a chilly site doesn’t have any pre-installed equipment, it takes tons of your time to properly set it up and fully resume business operations. In case of a disaster, an organization would require help from IT personnel to migrate necessary servers and make them functional in order to take on the workload of the primary site.
Warm Backup Strategy
A warm site is seen as the center ground between the cold site and hot site. A warm site may be a backup facility that has the network connectivity and therefore the necessary hardware equipment already pre-installed. However, a warm site cannot perform on an equivalent level as a production center because they’re not equipped within the same way.
Therefore, a warm site has less operational capacity than the first site. Moreover, data synchronization between the first and therefore the secondary site is performed daily or weekly, which may end in minor data loss.
A warm site is ideal for organizations which operate with less critical data and may tolerate a brief period of downtime. This type of a DR site is the second costliest option.
Hot Backup Strategy
A hot site may be a backup facility which represents a mirrored copy of the first production center. A hot site is provided with all the required hardware, software, and network connectivity, which allows you to perform near real-time backup or replication of the critical data. This way, the assembly workload is often failed over to a DR site in a jiffy or hours, thus ensuring minimal downtime and zero data loss. A hot site is predicted to be always online and running without disruption so as to ensure data synchronization between the sites.
A hot site is the most expensive option among the three. Thus, it is important to ensure that this type of a DR site is located far enough from the production center. This way, you’ll decrease the likelihood of a hot site suffering from an equivalent disaster like the primary site.
