Disaster recovery site options
Hot site, warm site or cold site? Here’s how to figure out the best disaster recovery strategy for your company.
The ability to recover from a disaster in an acceptable period of time is a critical issue for companies with increasing dependence on information technology. Once thought to be a concern for only larger organizations, being able to recover mission-critical applications within a predictable timeframe is a mandate for any size company today. But some users see disaster recovery (DR) as a pricey insurance policy, and may take shortcuts to try and save a few dollars. To avoid becoming victims of budget cuts, DR provisions and sites must be built around a few basic principles that allow management to decide what’s required while candidly showing the possible business impact and consequences of retrenchments.
Guiding principles
Recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) are the key metrics to determine the DR level required to recover business processes and applications. They are reciprocally proportional to the cost of DR: The closer RTO and RPO need to be to zero, the more expensive DR provisioning will be.
See Disaster recovery site options by Jacob Gsoedl, Storage Magazine. Site Registration is required.
Tags: cold site, hot site, recovery options, RPO RTO, warm site
