What is Disaster Recovery (DR) Site

Data Center plays a critical role in securing assets and helps companies organize, process, store, and distribute large amounts of data. This blog covers the basics of a Disaster Recovery (DR) site and its type.

What is a Disaster Recovery (DR) site?

A disaster recovery site is an additional set of IT infrastructure active only when the primary data center is not available. It may be exact replica of the primary data center or have lesser resources. It helps the organization to ensure the running of all critical business operations by providing additional data centers generally in different cities or provinces.

Types of DR site

For setting up a DR site, organizations have two options depending on the risk and cost involved:

Internal site: It is generally managed by the same organization and typically a second data center used by big companies to recover and resume operations on the failure of the primary data center.

External site: Some other organization generally manages it. It is further classified into three types: Hot, warm and cold sites. It is preferable to set up the location of the external site in a different city.

Types of External site

Hot site: It is a clone of the primary data center with the same infrastructure, staff, and customer data primary data center. It is working 24 hours a day and is ready for companies in the failure of the primary data center.

Warm site: It is similar to the Hot site but customer data is not available in the warm site. Organization installs customer data when a primary data center stops working or in the event of a disaster.

Cold site: It is a rented space with power, cooling facility, and internet connectivity but no IT infrastructure, staff, or customer data is available in the cold site. It only activates when the primary data center will not operate for a long time. In simple terms, you can say that It supplements the hot and warm sites in operations for a long time.

Conclusion

DR site plays a critical role in ensuring the availability of websites. This introductory article helps us understand the DR site and types of DR sites. Further, the DR site may be divided into an internal and external site. The external site further categorizes into hot, warm, and cold sites.