Definitions - Part I

As promised....here is some Lingo 101 for BCP and DR.

Since reading Disaster Recovery magazine is partially responsible for maintaining my interest in the disaster recovery industry, I thought I would reference them to help with defining some of the terminology. The following definitions come from their excellent glossary. Since my primary blog covers data centers I felt it was only appropriate to start with some DR terminology as it relates to how data centers can be used.
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Cold Site: an alternate facility that already has in place the environmental infrastructure required to recover critical business functions or information systems, but does not have any pre-installed computer hardware, telecommunications equipment, communication lines, etc. These must be provisioned at time of disaster.

Warm Site: an alternate processing site which is equipped with some hardware, and communications interfaces, electrical and environmental conditioning which is only capable of providing backup after additional provisioning, software or customization is performed.

Hot Site: An alternate facility that already has in place the computer, telecommunications, and environmental infrastructure required to recover critical business functions or information systems.