Organizations could use Alternate Sites to resume operations in the event of an incident or crisis.

Control Type: Technical

Control Function: Corrective

Description: An alternate site is a business continuity and disaster recovery process that involves using a secondary location to host copies of an organization's IT infrastructure and data for use in the event of a crisis. An alternate site can be a difficult investment for some organizations to justify, but its benefits during crisis scenarios are profound. Alternate sites are properties owned or rented by the organization that are typically geographically separated from the main facilities. For example, an office suite in the next town over would make more sense than an office a few doors down, since physical and environmental crises are some of the main use cases for an alternate site.

There are four main categories of alternate sites:

  1. Cold Site: A facility that has basic infrastructure like HVAC, electricity, and an Internet connection. However, no IT equipment is directly deployed. A cold site may take a significant amount of time to configure for use in a crisis. Because of this, it isn't optimal for larger organizations that need instant failover capabilities. However, a cold site is a great precaution for smaller organizations that only need a place to store backups and relocate their office setup in the event of a crisis.
  2. Warm Site: A facility that has running utilities and infrastructure, including an active Internet connection. It may also have workspaces and dedicated user endpoints configured. In the event of a crisis, there may be some slight downtime required to restore data and tune the network. After that, the site can become operational.
  3. Hot Site: A facility that functions as a fully configured mirror of the primary facility. There is usually a one-to-one copy of the network infrastructure, with data continuously replicated from the primary site. In the event of a crisis, users can immediately move to the secondary site and begin work.
  4. Mobile Site: A different approach to a redundant worksite is maintaining a company-owned mobile unit that serves as a backup datacenter or workspace. This usually looks like a trailer or recreational vehicle equipped with electricity and network infrastructure that can be switched on and used offsite during a crisis. This is an expensive option and is generally not scalable for large organizations with many employees. However, it is extremely effective for restoring operations during large environmental crises that may require relocation far from the primary site.

In addition to maintaining physical alternate sites, organizations can take a more affordable approach by hosting mirrors of their networks in a cloud environment. Using cloud providers like Azure or AWS, they can spin up virtual networks, virtual servers, and virtual desktop interfaces. Data can be replicated from the local network to the virtual cloud network in batches or even in real time. This approach is attractive because it allows employees to continue working from various locations rather than from one designated site. If a crisis results in employees being dispersed across different locations, this approach, known as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), is much more effective and scalable.

When alternate sites are used, there are several different approaches an organization can take to backing up data to the site:

  • Batch Processing: Data from the primary site is backed up to a network location at the alternate site in batches at specific intervals.
  • Electronic Vaulting: Data is sent to the alternate site through bulk transfers that contain data from all on-site sources.
  • Remote Journaling: This approach is specifically for databases and involves backing up database servers in batches along with their transaction logs.
  • Remote Mirroring: Changes to data are replicated from the primary site to the remote site in near real time. This typically requires identical servers at both the primary site and alternate site.
  • Physical Backups: This is the simplest approach and is usually used for cold sites. Physical copies of backups are created in tandem with the organization's regular backup schedule and then transported to the alternate site by the backup operator. In the event of a crisis, time will be required to restore the backups before they can be used.