D. Redundant communications links are a type of alternative system put in place to provide

locations. It’s very easy to get sidetracked and think of disaster recovery as purely an IT effort focused on restoring systems and processes to working order. To facilitate this effort, it’s sometimes best to develop separate recovery facilities for different work groups. For example, if you have several subsidiary organizations that are in different locations and that perform tasks similar to the tasks that work groups at your office perform, you may wish to consider temporarily relocating those work groups to the other facility and having them communicate electronically and via telephone with other business units until they’re ready to return to the main operations facility. Larger organizations may have difficulty finding recovery facilities capable of handling the entire business operation. This is another example of a circumstance in which independent recovery of different work groups is appropriate. Alternate Processing Sites One of the most important elements of the disaster recovery plan is the selection of alternate processing sites to be used when the primary sites are unavailable. There are many options avail- able when considering recovery facilities, limited only by the creative minds of disaster recovery planners and service providers. In the following sections, we’ll take a look at the several types of sites commonly used in disaster recovery planning: cold sites, warm sites, hot sites, mobile sites, service bureaus, and multiple sites. When choosing any type of alternate processing site, be sure to place it far away enough from your primary location that it won’t likely be affected by the same disaster that disables your primary site Cold Sites Cold sites are simply standby facilities large enough to handle the processing load of an orga- nization and with appropriate electrical and environmental support systems. They may be large warehouses, empty office buildings, or other similar structures. However, the cold site has no computing facilities hardware or software preinstalled and does not have activated broadband communications links. Many cold sites do have at least a few copper telephone lines, and some sites may have standby links that can be activated with minimal notification. The major advantage of a cold site is its relatively inexpensive cost—there is no computing base to maintain and no monthly telecommunications bill when the site is not in use. However, the drawbacks of such a site are obvious—there is a tremendous lag time between the time the decision is made to activate the site and the time the site is actually ready to support business operations. Servers and workstations must be brought in and configured. Data must be restored from backup tapes. Communications links must be activated or established. The time to acti- vate a cold site is often measured in weeks, making timely recovery close to impossible and often yielding a false sense of security.