Posts Tagged ‘computer’

What Is the Difference Between Hot, Warm and Cold Disaster Recovery?

December 17th, 2011

When it comes to implementing your business continuity plan what strategy do you adopt for the disaster recovery element? (for a description on the difference between Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity please see my article on Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity?).

You may have heard the terms hot, cold and warm recovery, but what do they mean, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of each service?

  • Hot Standby

Hot standby is normally available to the users within minutes of a disaster situation. This level of service is achieved by total duplication of the computer systems covered (hardware, software and data). There will also be a requirement for a resilient network connection into the Hot Site.

Benefits – Available immediately; dedicated to (customer).

Disadvantages – Cost; Complexity, management.

  • Warm Standby

Warm standby is normally available to the users within hours of a disaster situation. This is by far the most common type of service utilised by for I.T. disaster recovery, and typical recovery times range from 8 hours to 24 hours (dependant on complexity, location and data volumes).

The service can be delivered from a remote recovery centre, or alternatively, delivered to site in the event of a disaster. Depending on the equipment involved the configuration may be installed within an existing facility or a mobile recovery unit.

It should be noted that whilst the Hot standby option is normally dedicated to one customer, Warm standby is delivered on a subscription basis. Industry standards are between ten and twenty five subscribers per configuration. Availability is therefore not guaranteed in the event of a disaster. Testing is also normally to a predefined number of days P.A.

Benefits – Lower cost; reasonable availability.

Disadvantages – Availability; recovery timescales are longer; limited testing available; only available for a limited period following a disaster.

  • Cold Standby

Cold standby is the provision of computer and people facilities that are made available to the client within a few hours of the incident. Unless the service is backed up by a contract to supply the necessary computer equipment, the recovery period is likely to be several days. It is not unusual for Warm and Cold standby services to be combined, giving a very flexible approach to recovery.

Fully serviced office space is also available on a subscription basis. These are usually equipped with PCs, servers, printing facility and a network infrastructure. These would be described as Business Recovery Centres, and could also incorporate Cold space for central systems.

Benefits – Lower cost; large amount of available space (can accommodate large systems). Business recovery Centres can accommodate several hundred people.

Disadvantages – Availability; recovery timescales are longer; limited testing available; only available for a limited period following a disaster; additional recovery services needed.

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Big Time Disaster Recovery Solutions Available for the Little Guy

June 17th, 2011

There was a time – not too long ago – that Data Disaster Recovery solutions were available only in the domain of multinational corporations and big business in general. However, with the proliferation of high speed internet access and the ability to store large amounts of data in a much more cost effective manner due to plummeting storage costs, the ability to perform a secure backup of data to a remote location engineered specifically for the purpose of securely storing massive amounts of information is now in the reach of the general public.

As we come to depend on computers more and more every day, we also make a considerable investment in the data we produce with those computers. Massive data sets were once generated only by large corporations and scientific institutions. But now with the monstrous surge in computer use by millions of individuals and small businesses, there has become a need to provide the same data protection solutions on a smaller scale to facilitate the efficient backup and retrieval of all kinds of data for nearly all types of computer users.

Think about the type of information you store on your personal computer at home. Many computer users store hundreds (or even thousands) of files ranging from word processing documents to personal finance information to educational materials. The fact is: We use our computers every day and have the potential to suffer a great loss of productivity and irreplaceable data from something as common as an electrical storm. What would you do if you woke up one day to find that the entire contents of your computer were now inaccessible to you?

Fortunately, it is now extremely cost effective to implement a Data Disaster Recovery solution that not only backs up all the files of your choosing at an interval set by you, but also provides access to your data 24 hours a day, should you need to recover your data at any time.

Gaining immediate access to your backed up data is as simple as loading the software, typing your password, and enjoying a direct connection to your own secure online data repository with instant data recovery. The process is completely automated and can be initiated in seconds from any computer in the world. You can be secure in knowing that your data is safe and sound, stored in a world class facility with redundant power backup and as much storage as you need to ensure your most important files are there for you when you need them.

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Data Disasters – Horror Stories of Data Loss

June 12th, 2011

The threat of data loss exists with almost every click of your mouse. Life in the online world can be dangerous. Smart businesses will do whatever is required to minimize that risk.

Have you ever lost all of the data on a floppy disk and had to redo an entire afternoon’s work? Perhaps you have rendered a music or game CD unusable because of a tiny scratch? Maybe you have experienced a full fledged hard drive meltdown that resulted in gigabytes of lost data and months, even YEARS of lost effort.

The “worst case scenario” happened to me a few years ago. I received a call from a friend informing me that my home had been broken into and the burglars had not only stolen the electronics in the living room but had also taken the house’s PCs. I learned the hard way that data backup is something that every computer user who has important data on their hard drive cannot live without. Whether you simply purchase an external drive that you can connect via USB or Firewire, or sign up for offsite secure data backup, make sure you take steps to guarantee that your data is safe and sound, even if the worst happens to your computer hardware.

It doesn’t hit you right away when you no longer have access to your data. The first things that come to mind are the expensive hardware that went into building your machine. Maybe you had a nice flat panel monitor or a state of the art video card for playing the latest games. While it can be very disappointing to lose expensive tech goodies like these it is still no comparison to losing those zeros and ones etched into every user’s hard drive. Hardware can nearly always be replaced, even at no cost to you if you have insurance, but lost data is gone forever. There is no way to recover data that you have not backed up if you lose the original media it was stored on.

In my case, I was not using offsite secure data backup, or any kind of backup for that matter. My backup was about six months old and sitting on a tape drive in my closet. When those thieves walked off with my machine they left with not only an excellent gaming platform but also my entire web design portfolio, numerous customized versions of my resume, THOUSANDS of MP3 files that I had ripped from CDs (many of which I had lost the original CD for), Microsoft Money files, and thousands of digital photographs that are impossible to replace.

Take a moment and think about all the important digital files you have on your computer and ask yourself if it is worth investing a little of your time and money in an online remote backup solution to make sure that data is available for you for a lifetime.

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