In this lesson,
we're going to talk about redundant site considerations.
Now, a redundant site is a backup location
or facility that can take over essential functions
and operations in the case
that your primary site experiences a failure or disruption.
When you're creating your business continuity plan
or your disaster recovery plan,
you need to consider what type of continuity you need
to create using these different plans.
From a technical perspective,
we're going to break this down into four types
of categories based on your continuity locations.
These are hot sites, warm sites,
cold sites, and mobile sites.
Now, first up, we have a hot site.
A hot site is defined as a site that is up
and running continuously,
and essentially at a moment's notice it's ready
so we can switch our operations from our main site
to a backup site with almost no downtime and no issues.
Now, personally, this is one of my favorite types of setups
because it means you always are up and ready to go
and you can keep your business moving forward
even if a disaster strikes.
But our drawback here
is that using a hot site can be very expensive
because this type of redundant site requires one
of everything being added to your cost.
For example, to truly have an on-demand
and ready to go hot site,
you're going to need to have two of everything.
If I have a file server in my main office,
I need to have another file server at the hot site.
You're going to need to constantly update the communication
and mirror the data between these two sites as well,
so you have an updated copy at all times.
Now, back in the old days,
this was actually really difficult and expensive to do,
but the good news is with cloud computing,
this has become much, much easier
because now you can have your servers hosted online
at multiple locations simultaneously
using Amazon Web Services,
Microsoft Azure, or the Google Cloud platform.
Now, while this type of hot site for your servers is great,
it doesn't fully consider everything you need
in terms of a hot site.
Again. What about your office building,
where your employees are going to be at doing their work?
How are you going to have redundancy for that?
Well, let's say, for example,
there's a fire and your entire headquarters got affected.
You have smoked damage and water damage all
because of that fire, and now it's going to take you six months
to rebuild your headquarters.
Well, if you have a fully redundant cloud-based model
for your hot site, this means all your data is up
and running instantly and ready to go.
But if you had 500 people working in that office building,
you now need to find a place to put 500 desks, 500 chairs,
500 phones, 500 computers,
and all the stuff that people need
to be able to do their job at work
because everything else was destroyed
in that fire at our main headquarters.
This is why a hot site is usually not used by most companies
for their entire business,
but instead they'll use it just for mission critical things
that have to be up 24 hours a day,
seven days a week continuously.
And so you may have 500 people working
in your main office building,
but maybe only 50 of them are considered essential
and crucial to your business operations.
And so you only have a hot site capability
for those 50 people,
and we'll figure out the other 450 people later.
Now, the second type of site we have
is what's known as a warm site.
Now, a warm site is not fully equipped like a hot site is,
and so remember with a hot site, we have our desks,
we have our chairs, we have our network connectivity,
we have our computers and our phones
and our software and everything we need
to be able to walk right in, log in,
and start doing our job.
Now, with a warm site,
we're not quite that far down the road.
Instead, we're not ready for an immediate switchover,
but we can get things up
and running in just a few days as opposed to a few hours.
Now, a warm site will have all the fundamentals in place.
For example, the building already has power,
it has phone lines, it has network connectivity.
We may even have some desks there,
but we may not have phones in computers already installed.
Now, when a disaster happens,
we can then start installing the technology
and getting people up and running within just a few days,
but we're going to have to go out and buy some laptops,
some monitors and some phones
and things like that to be able to do it.
Now, when we talked about a hot site,
we talked about the fact that it was instantly available,
but that also comes with a very high price tag.
Now, with a warm site,
we're actually going to be able to save a lot of money here,
and it's going to be a lot cheaper,
but we're also giving up some of that response time
because now we have to wait a few days
to get everything up and running.
And so again, this is one of those things
that we sometimes do as a hybrid model where a portion
of the organization will get a hot site,
such as those 50 people out of the 500
that we're super critically important to run the business,
and then the other 450 people will be able
to go into a warm site later on
or into our last one we're going to talk about,
which is a cold site.
Now, this again brings us to our third option,
which is a cold site.
Now, this is going to add some more time to our recovery,
but it is also cheaper than using either
a hot site or a warm site.
Now, a cold site is going to contain even fewer facilities
than a warm site does.
For example, one organization I worked
with in the past had a cold site
that essentially was just an empty building they had
a lease on.
They paid a monthly rent for this building
and nobody worked there.
The cold site had a few basic facilities like bathrooms
and tables and chairs, but there was no network
or connectivity at that place.
There were no phone lines and there was no computers.
Essentially, it was an empty shell,
and in the event of a serious disaster
at their headquarters,
they could turn this cold site into a new headquarters
in about one to two months.
Now, fourth, we have a mobile site.
Now, a mobile site can be a hot site,
a warm site, or a cold site.
It just depends on how you want to configure it.
Now basically up to this point,
I was discussing how you can get
from one building to another by using a hot site,
a warm site, or a cold site.
But with a mobile site,
we don't even need buildings anymore.
Instead, we're using independent,
portable units to provide our recovery.
Most often, this will take the form of trailers or tents
that are going to be delivered to your location
and connected to your power and internet,
and that way you can get up and running pretty quickly.
For example, I used to work with the US military,
and they have something known as the DJC2.
Now, the DJC2
is the Deployable Joint Command and Control System.
This thing is actually an integrated command
and control headquarters
that can be delivered anywhere in the world
within about 72 hours.
Now, once it gets on the ground,
it takes 'em another 24 hours
to start providing some functionality and services,
and then takes up to seven days
to provide full functionality
and services for all of their users.
Now, with the DJC2,
it's actually made up of a series of tents,
and they have generators for power.
They bring portable air conditioning units
to keep the servers cold.
They bring in tables and chairs and phones and networks
and laptops, and all the things you need to support up
to 200 people inside of this large tent structure.
For example, back in 2010, there was a major earthquake
that hit the island nation of Haiti.
Back then, the US military deployed one
of these DJC2 there to act as a mobile command center
and run all the recovery operations.
Now, the great thing about this type
of mobile recovery site is that they're fully contained.
They come with everything you need,
including power, connectivity,
and the technicians needed to run the entire thing.
So you may be wondering,
which of these types of sites should I use
in my organization, a hot site, a warm site, a cold site,
or a mobile site?
Well, this is why senior managers need to be involved
in your business continuity plan creation process,
because sometimes you're going to choose one of these,
or you might choose multiple of these,
breaking them out for different business functions,
different scenarios, or different timelines,
or different groups of users.
Now, for example, in my company,
we actually use a full hot site for our servers
to ensure they're always up and operational at all times,
but we don't use a full hot site for our employees.
Instead, we have an office and we allow
and encourage telework in our organization.
So for the most part,
most of my team members are working
from their own home offices
and not from our office building.
Since we've designed all of our technology
to be able to support a fully remote workforce like this,
it means that if one
of their home offices loses power or internet,
we could simply put them into a local hotel room,
and as long as they have internet and power in that hotel,
they'll be able to reconnect
and get back to work right away.
Now, in addition to all of that,
we also plan for potential power outages
and internet outages at our offices,
because we have primary power being delivered
by solar panels, then we have backup power
for the times the sun isn't out.
Now, if we run out of battery power,
we actually can go into our backup generators,
and we also have a connection back to the local power grid,
and we can also pull power from there too if we need to.
So for internet connectivity,
we do the same kind of thing as well by having redundancies.
In fact, we have three different connections to our offices.
The first one is a microwave link
that gives us high speed uploads and downloads.
If that fails, we have a redundant connection
from a local cable company
that provides high speed downloads but slower uploads.
Now, both of those options fail,
we have a third connection,
and this is actually a cellular modem backup
that provides about 20 megabits per second of service
for uploads and downloads.
By layering our internet connectivity
as part of our business continuity planning,
we know that our expected response in downtime
would be for a primary internet connection failure,
for example, and then we know we can shift
to a secondary one in just a few seconds
or a third one in a few seconds after that if needed.
Now, up to this point,
we've talked about four main types of sites.
We've talked about hot sites, warm sites,
cold sites, and mobile sites.
But recently we also have to introduce a fifth type of site,
which is known as a virtual site.
Now, a virtual site represents a modern
and highly flexible approach
to implementing redundant site strategies
by offering various alternatives for hot sites,
warm sites, and cold sites within a cloud-based environment.
In a cloud-based redundant site setup,
organizations can leverage the scalability
and availability of cloud computing platforms
to ensure their continuity of operations.
A virtual hot site in this context would involve
a fully replicated and instantly accessible environment
in the cloud that's ready to take over
in the event of a failure at your primary site,
a virtual warm site may entail
having partially replicated resources and data
that could be quickly scaled up
to full functionality if needed,
and a virtual cold site could involve storing critical data
and configurations in the cloud,
but activating resources only in response to a disaster
in order to minimize your ongoing operational costs.
The use of these virtual sites in the cloud does offer us
with the advantage of rapid scalability, cost effectiveness,
and easy maintenance.
And all of this makes them an attractive options
for organizations that are aiming
to enhance their disaster recovery capabilities.
Now, the final thing we need to discuss
as a redundant site consideration
is the use of platform diversity.
Platform diversity is a critical aspect of designing
and implementing effective virtual redundant sites.
By diversifying the type of operating systems,
networking equipment, and cloud platform providers
that are going to be used for redundancy,
your organization can mitigate the risk of a single point
of failure in their disaster recovery strategy.
For example, if you wanted
to have cloud provider platform diversity,
this can involve spreading our resources
across multiple cloud service providers,
or across different regions within the same provider
to ensure that a failure or outage in one platform
or area of the world doesn't compromise
the entire redundant site.
This approach does enhance the resilience
and reduces the likelihood of downtime
due to a cloud specific issue.
Moreover, platform diversity also allows your organization
to leverage its unique features, pricing structures,
and geographic reach of your different cloud providers
in order to optimize your disaster recovery strategy
to meet your specific business needs.
Using cloud platform diversity is a strategic move
that helps to ensure greater reliability
and adaptability in the face
of unexpected disruptions while making the implementation
of virtual redundant sites even more robust and resilient.
Now, another type of platform diversity is going to involve
using different operating systems
or types of network infrastructure at your redundant sites
than you would at your primary site.
For example, if your primary site uses
a Cisco based network,
your redundant site might choose to use a different router
and switch provider.
But, "Why?" you might ask.
Doesn't that just complicate things?
Well, if you're using the same equipment in both sites,
you're going to have an easier time supporting it
and running the network because they're identical in nature,
which is great because all your technicians
already have that skillset.
But if a major vulnerability existed
that attacked all Cisco based networks,
it could also attack your hot site's network, too,
and now you don't have your redundant site available,
but if you're using a different platform on your hot site,
it's going to remain immune to this type
of vulnerability and attack.
Again, this is something that you
and your senior decision makers are going to weigh the risks
and the rewards to determine what makes the most sense
for your organization.
Should you have platform diversity
and the more complex configurations and support it requires,
or should you just use the same operating systems
and equipment across all of your redundant sites
because it makes it easier to support
and gives you lower maintenance costs?
Either of these can be the right answer depending
on your specific situation.
So remember, when it comes to determining which type
of redundant site you should use,
you should not only just consider your tech stack,
but you also need to think about
where you're going to put your people
and where they're going to be able to work,
as well as how you're going to support them for the long term
as you attempt to continue your operations
and serve your customers.
Continuity of operations refers to the ability
of an organization to maintain essential functions
and services in the event of a disruption.
A hot site is going to be one
that includes a fully equipped backup facility
where a warm site will have partially equipped backups,
and a cold site will be locations without equipment
that is readily available.
And finally, remember that it's important
that you also consider to use geographic dispersion
to help spread out your resources across different locations
so you can create higher levels of redundancy, too.