Cold Site

A cold site, also known as a “shell site,” is a designated standby recovery facility (a warehouse, an empty office building, or a similar construction) large enough to host the mission-critical activities and applications of an organization's primary site. It is essentially a reserved maintained space (raised floors with electricity, air conditioning, humidity controls, fire protection, and pre-installed wiring) ready for the installation of workstations, office equipment, and networking and computer systems that will be shipped in the event of a primary site outage.

As a cold site does not come set up with hardware, software, or backed-up versions of the organization's data, it requires minimal startup costs. Vendors offer cold site services on an annual subscription fee that includes access to the facility and, in most cases, two one-day disaster recovery tests. Although this is a less expensive site recovery strategy, it should be noted that it also takes some extra time to get the organization's systems up and running after the outage because new systems have to be installed. Normally, the organization should expect full recovery of its work environment within 48 hours from disaster declaration, making this solution more suitable for organizations that can sustain a few days of downtime before business resumption and for those that, following a major disaster, lose their primary site for quite a long time. A further limitation of cold sites is that the testing of the service can become very expensive because it cannot take place unless all equipment and systems are expedited and communications lines installed and configured according to the organization's needs. Equipment and systems must be temporarily rented or leased and then, at the end of the test, returned to their owners. Alternatively, they can be sourced from the primary site, but this solution may cause disruption to the business (unless a test is run on nonworking days, for example, during a weekend) and transportation to and from the cold site increases the risk of damage.

Cold site service vendors may have multiple subscribers contracted to use their sites. In the advent of a widespread disaster, only one of these will be able to relocate in every site. It is therefore important that the organization require the vendor to clearly state in the contract the limits on the number of clients from the same geographical area entitled to use the cold site services offered. The organization may also consider including a “no lockout” clause in the contract, something that, on one hand, will increase the cost of the service but, on the other hand, will guarantee a cold site even in periods of high demand.

An attractive alternative to a cold “shell” site service is the use of mobile sites or “porta-sites.” In this scenario, self-contained trailers or other easily relocated units equipped with the appropriate environmental controls, electrical generators, and telecommunication systems are transported to the primary site so that equipment can be obtained and installed near the original location. Business continuity plans should reflect how long it will take for the mobile site to be set up and running in the disaster location and all pre-configurations [Page 141]required for this. The service usually costs the same as a cold site but brings the work environment to the end user, thus saving travel time for the recovery personnel and offering greater flexibility to organizations with multiple sites nationally and internationally. An additional advantage this option offers is that it makes testing more feasible. Mobile sites may also be configured to offer “warm” or “hot” site recovery services.

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