Disaster recovery is paramount for business continuity and data protection after a data breach or during an unforeseen critical outage of infrastructure. During incident response, disaster recovery plans are set into action. One element of disaster recovery is temporary uptime infrastructure to keep the business productive while original infrastructure is repaired. Hot site disaster recovery infrastructure is the fastest and most effective way to keep you in business while incident response is completed.
What Is Hot Site Disaster Recovery?
A hot site disaster recovery is a complete mirror of your data and infrastructure with the resiliency architecture for scalability. When the primary production environment fails, a hot site can immediately take over. Failover can be manual or automatic depending on the environment. A few key features in a hot site include:
- Power to support electricity to infrastructure
- Mirror copies of data so that applications and users can continue productivity
- Cooling systems if the hot recovery site is in a data center
- Internet connectivity and access to any cloud infrastructure
- Communication equipment like VoIP services
- Interconnectivity between servers and users
- Identity management and security infrastructure
- Critical productivity applications including databases and web applications
- Workstation resources for staff
How Does Hot Site Disaster Recovery Work?
To keep a mirror of data, files, and infrastructure, a hot site disaster recovery location must be continually updated and data synchronized. The business must determine the amount of data that can be lost before downtime critically impacts revenue and business continuity. This value is used to then determine the frequency at which data is replicated to the disaster recovery site. Frequency of data synchronization might be a week, a day, a month, or even every hour.
Infrastructure should mirror operational hardware and software at the primary location. Cloud infrastructure is often used to make provisioning and deployment of a hot site more efficient. Custom scripts or out-of-the-box software can be used to replicate data and synchronize it between the production environment and the hot site recovery location.
Testing is necessary to ensure that your hot site is functional during a disaster or catastrophic failure of infrastructure. Businesses should perform disaster recovery exercises where administrators must bring up the hot site in a similar scenario as if the organization was currently suffering from downtime or a cyber incident. This testing prepares everyone for the worst so that they can deploy disaster recovery as effectively as possible to bring the business to a productive state as quickly as possible.
Advantages of Hot Site Disaster Recovery
Because a hot site is a mirror of your production environment, its biggest advantage is that it can act similarly to the primary production environment during a disaster. Users can stay productive as administrators repair the primary infrastructure and customers still have access to critical applications. Switching over to the hot site should not take long, and users should not need too much additional equipment to get back to work.
Quick available failover mirroring the production environment means less downtime between a catastrophic failure and business continuity. Less downtime means a reduction in monetary loss during a disaster. Data is synchronized so it can be recovered from the hot site after the primary site is brought back to production.
Although a hot site reduces productivity downtime, it’s the most costly option for businesses. They must weigh the costs to maintain a hot site and the cost savings associated with disaster recovery. For an enterprise, a hot site has a high return on investment during failure when monetary loss can be millions of dollars a day.
Hot vs. Warm vs. Cold Site Disaster Recovery
A full mirror of your data isn’t your only option, although a hot site is the best for better uptime during a disaster. A warm site and a cold site are also options, but they have their own advantages and disadvantages. Warm sites and cold sites are less costly than hot sites, but they do not have the mirror images of your infrastructure and data.
The cheapest of all three sites is a cold site. A cold site has some equipment, but it does not maintain internet connectivity or production data. Files and data must be copied over to the cold site prior to its use. Power and internet connectivity must be deployed prior to use as well. A cold site is the most affordable of all disaster recovery sites, but downtime for production lasts longer, which increases the impact on revenue.
Warm sites are a mix between a cold site and a hot site. A warm site might have some data, power, and internet connectivity, but it won’t be a mirror image of your primary production environment. While some work will be necessary to bring up a warm site, it doesn’t take as much effort as a cold site. A warm site is cheaper than a hot site but more costly than a cold site.
Considerations for Implementing Hot Site Disaster Recovery
Hot sites are generally built in a data center, so you need a provider with a secure location with the infrastructure to mirror your own. The cloud provider must have a service level agreement (SLA) with consideration for uptime. Most providers offer a 99.99% uptime guarantee, but check the provider’s SLA. If your hot site suffers from downtime, it becomes a risk when you need it for disaster recovery.
A disaster recovery plan is necessary to manage and determine a budget for a hot site. Hot sites offer compliant infrastructure, and a disaster recovery plan is often a requirement for regulatory compliance. Disaster recovery plans require expert knowledge in identifying risks and what’s necessary to keep your business running, so contact a professional if you do not know what’s needed for an effective plan.
Conclusion
Disaster recovery is a requirement of many compliance organizations, and a hot site is the most cost-effective during a failure or after a data breach. You’ll need a provider with the uptime, reliability, and availability necessary to support all the infrastructure and data storage required to build a hot site. Pure Storage’s disaster recovery service offers all you need for a hot site and more.
