Disaster Recovery
One of the most important components to network security is to have a solid disaster recovery plan in place in the event of a security breach, denial of service, or other malicious act that could cause a disaster with your network.
Having a disaster recovery plan in place means that the organization should have a designated location where the recovery can take place and the data center reconstructed. This type of location is known as an offsite backup site and will be the location where you operate from during the entire duration of the disaster.
There are many different forms of backup, however, there are three basic types of backup sites you should know about:
Cold Backup Sites
This type of backup site is also known as an offline backup because it is an offline database that is not accessible for updates and is generally a space that has been reserved within a building. Although cold backup sites are the least expensive way of backing up data, it involves downtime to restore service to the users since they cannot access the database during the recovery process.
With a cold backup site, everything that is required to restore service must be delivered to the site making restoration efforts from the cold backup site to full operation tedious and time consuming.
Warm Backup Sites
A warm backup site is a site that is already equipped with hardware that contains a backup of the information that is contained in the data center. Before you can use a warm backup site to restore service, the most recent backups from the remote storage facility must be delivered before recovery can begin.
Although a warm backup site contains backups, the information may be incomplete due to the fact that the backup may have been sent to the facility as much as one week ago.
Hot Backup Site
This is the most efficient means of disaster recovery and of course the most expensive. With a hot backup site, users can continue to access the database while restoration is in process as long as the data that is being updated is noted and then copied when the update is finished.
Recovery through a hot backup site can take place within a few hours due to the fact that the hot backup contains a replica of the current data in the data center. The only item that needs to be added is the latest backups from the off-site storage facility.
Offsite backup sites can be provided by organizations that specialize in disaster recovery, a location within your own organization, or a shared facility by multiple organizations. The method that is chosen by the organization depends upon cost and the individual needs of each organization.
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