Business Continuity – Business Backup Sites

Business activity interruptions can come from a variety of sources including:

• Disease
• Earthquake
• Fire
• Flood
• Cyber attack
• Sabotage
• Hurricane
• Utility outage
• Terrorism

Some of these incidents may necessitate your evacuating your normal business premises.

What do you do whilst you are not in your premises? You can either stop operations whilst your offices are unavailable (which depending on the disaster could be months) or you can continue operating from an alternative site.

Making provisions now for future emergencies including choosing an appropriate alternative business sites will minimise the risks and avoid unnecessary disruption when disaster strikes.

One of the main considerations to consider when choosing a backup site is the cost incurred in not only ‘ear-marking’ the site (or owning it) but also the cost of equipping the site and transferring operations across. Depending on the nature of your business, there are three types of site to choose from:

• Cold sites
• Hot sites
• Warm Sites

Cold sites

This is the cheapest option as it does not involve setting up the site (including infrastructure, hardware and software) but merely identifying and securing a work area recovery site.

Although this is the cheapest option for setup costs, it can also be the most expensive for disruption as it will take longer to get the alternative site operational. The cost of the alternative site needs to be weighed up against the cost of not operating for ex-weeks to see whether this solution is best suited or not.

Hot sites

A hot site is the complete opposite to a cold site (as the name would suggest!). Hot sites are always ready, full equipped so as to be ready to operate from at a moment’s notice. The site will be equipped with the necessary computer systems, which will also contain the most recent backup available so that operations are continuing from where you left off with no loss of data and therefore no loss of productivity.

Hot sites are, of course, the most expensive work area recovery site to setup. However, if your company operates real-time processes, such as financial institutions, government agencies and ecommerce providers, you may feel a hot site is the best protection.

Warm sites

Well yes, you have guessed it, a warm site is a middle marker between a cold site and a hot site. A warm site is equipped for the business operations but on a smaller scale. This means that operations can be handed over to it quickly but operations would be reduced (e.g. to provide the essential services to clients).

So which one should I choose?

Well you could say that the most correct answer would be a Hot Site but then again depending on your operations, a cold site might be the better option. You need to weigh up the cost of setting up an alternative site to the risk and relevant cost of not being able to operate your business.