Three System Recovery Strategies for Success

Business owners and IT managers understand that data and applications form the backbone of their enterprises. They enable connections between employees and customers, maintain system operations, and ensure efficient information storage and access.

There may come a time, however, when unplanned downtime occurs — whether as a result of an unforeseen event such as a fire or severe weather, technical issues or data corruption, or more malicious activity such as infiltration by cybercriminals attacking your system from the outside.

Either way, it can cause major disruption and significant loss of revenue when your data and applications become inaccessible. The key factor during data and application loss is a swift recovery.

The faster your systems are up and running — and your data and applications are fully functional and accessible again — the quicker you can mitigate damage and revenue shortfall.

To address this challenge, businesses can choose from several system recovery strategies tailored to their specific needs.

Types of System Recovery Strategies

When considering a system recovery plan, you have three main strategies at your disposal: High Availability, Warm Availability and Cold Standby Recovery. Each offers advantages based on your current and future requirements, as well as your budget.

Let’s explore how each strategy safeguards and restores your critical systems, data and applications during an outage or unexpected downtime:

High Availability Strategy

With this option, your mission-critical resources are replicated in real time to a comparable target system — effectively creating a mirror image of your source system on a target system.
Your essential resources may include servers, clusters and applications, databases, storage arrays and network resources. It’s wise to store replicated resources offsite to ensure they remain protected if your source data or applications are unexpectedly offline.
With High Availability, should an outage occur, all or part of your production processing is automatically or manually switched over to the target system. The target resources now function as though they were your original resources. When both systems are synchronised, processing reverts to the original source, leaving the target in place as a High Availability backup — hence the name.
The advantages of the High Availability strategy include minimal application and user downtime, rapid recovery, the ability to switch or take systems offline instantaneously, and a low Recovery Point Objective (RPO) with minimal data loss. If keeping mission-critical components continuously available with near-zero downtime is essential, High Availability is the optimal recovery strategy.

Warm Availability Strategy

This recovery strategy offers many of the benefits of High Availability — without using continuous replication to keep data and applications in sync. With Warm Availability, you’ll have all the dedicated hardware and software resources of the original source, housed at a remote location. They’re periodically refreshed to ensure both environments remain comparable, using external media, disk-based backup or a cloud vaulting system.
In the event of an outage, the ‘warm’ system must be updated from the most recent backup of the source system. It also achieves a better Recovery Time Objective (RTO) than a cold standby server, which must be rebuilt from scratch after an outage.
Warm Availability ensures that dedicated target systems are always on standby and configured to a recent version of your source system. The target only needs to be refreshed, not provisioned. IT teams can switch to the target system immediately without a data refresh, allowing processing to resume within hours. In addition, Warm Availability offers lower software, administrative and operational costs.
If your systems and components can tolerate short periods of downtime — measured in hours rather than minutes — then Warm Availability is an ideal option for your business.

Cold Standby Strategy

The Cold Standby option is a logical recovery strategy for businesses that run non-critical applications and servers where downtime is less disruptive. It’s ideal for systems where data is updated infrequently and can be reloaded from an existing backup. It’s also a sound solution for organisations with tighter budgets. In this strategy, a redundant replica — or cold server — of a primary server is maintained in a recovery environment.
The cold server is pre-staged with the operating system and allocated the same resources as the primary server. Should an outage occur, the cold server is activated, and data and applications are restored from the last known successful backup. Some support will likely be required to fully restore the source system and its data before it operates at peak efficiency.
In short, the Cold Standby recovery option is the most affordable of the three strategies. Resources can also be segmented and managed by different teams while still meeting essential Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective requirements.

Choosing the Right Strategy

A CloudFirst representative can help you determine the most effective system recovery strategy for your business today — and as it grows in the future.