Implement Recovery Strategies

Recovery strategies are important because they have a big impact on how long the organization will be down or have a degraded environment.

Backup Storage Strategies

In order to cover all reasonable scenarios, backup storage strategies often involve the following:

1- Secure offsite storage: Store backup media at a remote location. Offsite backup storage provides the following benefits:

  • If earthquake, flood, or fire destroy your data center, your backup data isn’t destroyed with it.
  • Offsite storage providers provide environmentally sensitive storage facilities with high-quality environmental characteristics around humidity, temperature, and light.
  • Offsite storage providers provide additional services that company would have to manage else; such as tape rotation, i.e., delivery of new tapes and pickup of old tapes, electronic vaulting, i.e., storing backup data electronically, and organization, i.e., labeling of all media, dates and times.

2- Transport via secure courier: This can discourage or prevent theft of backup media while it is in transit to a remote location.

3- Backup media encryption: For prevent that unauthorized third party from being able to recover data from backup media.

4- Data replication: Sending data to an offsite or remote data center, or cloud-based storage provider.

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Recovery Site Strategies

An organization with 3 or more data centers can have a primary data center, a secondary data center (recovery site) and regional data centers.

Some organizations that have multiple data centers have a different strategy, which includes the following physical sites:

  • Hot sites: a fully functional data center or other facility that is always up and ready with near real-time replication of production systems and data.
  • Cold sites: a data center or facility that may have some recovery equipment available but not configured, and no backup data onsite.
  • Warm sites: some hardware and connectivity is prepositioned and configured, plus an offsite copy of backup data.

Also see this article about these sites here.

However, selecting a recovery site strategy has everything to do with cost and service level.

Today, with the rapid development of public cloud capabilities, the public cloud has become to one solution to backup data.