- [Narrator] During a disaster, organizations may need
to shift their computing functions
from their primary data center to an alternate facility
designed to carry the load when the primary site
is unavailable or nonfunctioning.
Disaster recovery sites are alternate processing facilities
specifically designed for this purpose.
Most of the time, they sit idle, waiting to step in
when an emergency situation arises.
There are three main types of alternate processing facility,
hot sites, cold sites, and warm sites.
Hot sites are the premier form
of disaster recovery facility.
The are fully operational data centers
that have all of the equipment and data
required to handle operations, ready to run.
Technology staff can activate the hot site
at a moment's notice.
And, in many cases, the hot site
will actually activate itself if the primary site fails.
This provides an unparalleled level of redundancy,
but it also comes at great expense.
The costs of building and maintaining a hot site
are typically similar to those of running
the primary data center.
You're doubling your costs to achieve
tremendous recovery capability.
Cold sites, on the other hand, are facilities
that may be used to restore operations eventually
but with a significant investment of time.
They're essentially empty data centers.
They have the core racks, cabling, network connections,
and environmental controls necessary to support
data center operations, but they don't have the servers
or data required to restore business operations.
Cold sites are far less expensive than hot sites,
but activating them may require
weeks or even months of effort.
Warm sites are a compromise.
They do have the hardware and software
necessary to support the company's operations
but they are not kept running in a parallel fashion.
The hardware costs are the same as a hot site,
but warm sites require much less investment
of time from IT staff.
Activating a warm site may take hours or days,
depending upon the circumstances.
Disaster recovery sites not only provide
a facility for technology operations,
but they also serve as an offsite storage location
for business data.
Backing up business data is important,
and storing those backups in a secure facility
that is geographically distant from the primary facility
provides added assurance that the same disaster
will not damage both the primary facility and the backups.
Backups may be physically transported
to the disaster recovery site on a periodic basis,
or they may be transferred digitally,
using a process known as electronic vaulting.