Continuity of operations planning (COOP) sites provide an alternate location for operations after a critical outage. If you’re planning on taking the Security+ exam, you should have a basic understanding of the most common sites such as cold, warm, and hot sites.
For example, can you answer this question?
Q. Personnel within your organization turned off the HR data server for over six hours to perform a test. Which of the following is the MOST likely purpose of this?
A. BIA
B. Succession planning
C. Tabletop exercises
D. COOP
More, do you know why the correct answer is correct and the incorrect answers are incorrect? The answer and explanation is available at the end of this post.
Continuity of Operations
Continuity of operations planning (COOP) is an important element of a BCP. It focuses on restoring critical business functions at an alternate location after a critical outage. For example, if a hurricane or other disaster prevents the company from operating in one location, a COOP site allows it to continue to provide critical services at an alternate location. Many organizations plan for using a COOP site for as long as 30 days after relocating.
In this context, a site is an alternate location. It could be office space within a building, an entire building, or even a group of buildings. The four primary types of alternate sites are hot sites, cold sites, warm sites, and mobile sites.
As a rule of thumb, you’d use a hot site when you need to be operational within 60 minutes, or a cold site if you must be operational within a few days. For periods between these two extremes, you’d use a warm site. A mobile site is an alternate location when an organization doesn’t want to have a permanent location as an alternate site.
Remember this
Continuity of operations planning (COOP) sites provide an alternate location for operations after a critical outage. The most common sites are hot, cold, warm, and mobile sites.
Hot Site
A hot site would be up and operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week and would be able to take over functionality from the primary site quickly after a primary site failure. It would include all the equipment, software, and communication capabilities of the primary site, and all the data would be up to date. In many cases, copies of backup tapes are stored at the hot site as the off-site location.
In many cases, a hot site is another active business location that has the capability to assume operations during a disaster. For example, a financial institution could have locations in two separate cities. The second location provides noncritical support services, but also includes all the resources necessary to assume the functions of the first location.
Some definitions of hot sites indicate they can take over instantaneously, though this isn’t consistent. In most cases, it takes a little bit of time to transfer operations to the hot site, and this can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour.
Clearly, a hot site is the most effective disaster recovery solution for high-availability requirements. If an organization must keep critical systems with high-availability requirements, the hot site is the best choice. However, a hot site is the most expensive to maintain and keep up to date.
Remember this
A hot site includes personnel, equipment, software, and communication capabilities of the primary site with all the data up to date. A hot site provides the shortest recovery time compared with warm and cold sites. It is the most effective disaster recovery solution but is also the most expensive to maintain.
Cold Site
A cold site requires power and connectivity but not much else. Generally, if it has a roof, electricity, running water, and Internet access, you’re good to go. The organization brings all the equipment, software, and data to the site when it activates it.
I often take my dogs for a walk at a local army base and occasionally see soldiers activate an extreme example of a cold site. On most weekends, the fields are empty. Other weekends, soldiers have transformed one or more fields into complete operational sites with tents, antennas, cables, generators, and porta-potties.
Because the army has several buildings on the base, they don’t need to operate in the middle of fields, but what they’re really doing is testing their ability to stand up a cold site wherever they want. If they can do it in the field, they can do it in the middle of a desert, or anywhere else they need to.
A cold site is the cheapest to maintain, but it is also the most difficult to test.
Warm Site
You can think of a warm site as the Goldilocks solution—not too hot and not too cold, but just right. Hot sites are generally too expensive for most organizations, and cold sites generally take too long to configure for full operation. However, the warm site provides a compromise that an organization can tailor to meet its needs.
For example, an organization can place all the necessary hardware at the warm site location but not include up-to-date data. If a disaster occurs, the organization can copy the data to the warm site and take over operations. This is only one example, but there are many different possibilities of warm site configurations.
Q. Personnel within your organization turned off the HR data server for over six hours to perform a test. Which of the following is the MOST likely purpose of this?
A. BIA
B. Succession planning
C. Tabletop exercises
D. COOP
Answer is D. The most likely reason for personnel to turn off a server for testing is to test elements of continuity of operations planning (COOP). This helps determine if the organization can continue to operate despite the outage.
A business impact analysis (BIA) is performed before creating business continuity plans, not to test them.
Succession planning identifies a chain of command during a disaster.
Tabletop exercises are discussion-based exercises and do not include manipulating any systems.