Multi-site disaster recovery

Multi-site disaster recovery means replicating data, and depending on maturity the services themselves, to a site geographically separate from production. It is the only real protection against the total loss of a single site, whatever the cause. Intra-site redundancy covers the failure of a component; multi-site continuity covers the loss of the whole building. A usable copy of the data survives elsewhere, ideally with the ability to fail services over. How much protection you get depends heavily on replication frequency, continuous or periodic backups, and on the distance between sites: a replica too close by stays exposed to the same regional event. For underwriters, whether a plan exists, how often it is tested and where the sites actually are have become increasingly decisive criteria. Several major losses turned up clients without one, who thought the strength of their primary provider alone had them covered. It is a common mix-up between a provider's operational resilience and protection against losing the whole site.